John Linton .....remains very unclear....at least it does to me.
Telstra Retail continues to 'attack' Exetel's ADSL customer base and it has become almost impossible to maintain the number of customers in Zone One that Telstra Wholesale requires to maintain the current 'discounts for all zones. I did some more work on the possible results of not 'enjoying preferential volume discounts' from Telstra Wholesale if zTelstra Retail continues to take customers from Exetel and enough current Exetel customers chose to move their Exetel ADSL service from the Telstra infrastructure to either AAPT or Optus infrastructure. As I didn't have even the possible numbers, let alone any basis for estimating what the likely take up would be, this was not a particularly useful exercise - but then sometimes commercial life is like that. Irrespective of what those numbers turn out to be, and we will have the possible totals sometime later today, we are unable to do anything about the zone 2 and 3 customers on the Telstra infrastructure as there is no choice in almost all those locations and the NBNCo alternative is some unknown time away.
However my rough math indicated that if half the current Zone One customers currently using Exete/Telstra infrastructure services in Zone One decided to use AAPT based services for their ADSL2 services only (no change in telephone line supplier) then the savings on the port charges and back haul charges would cancel out the steep rise in the port rental charges on the remaining Zone One Telstra charges and 100% of the rise in the Zone Two and Zone Three port charges. If some additional proportion of the remaining Zone One Telstra users elected to move their ADSL service and their Telephone line service to Optus then Exetel would be progressively better off financially and would have 'broken the bonds' of being chained to Testra....a cheerful prospect.
It's anybody's guess as to how many and how soon the NBNCo will provide alternative fibre services in the Telstra Zone 2 and Zone 3 areas - I very much doubt that it will be in my 'commercial life time' and perhaps not even in my actual life time given what changes may occur should there be a change of government at the next Federal election. So what Exetel, or anyone else can do to improve the supply of communications services to regional and rural areas is unclear to me. Over time I still think that wireless broadband will provide a more than adequate alternative to ADSL2 but the time frames are as unclear (at least to me) as the time frames for NBN2 availability. Which brings up the question of how to effectively deal with Telstra Wholesale in the near and medium term future....
.....and I have no firm views on either how Exetel might approach that issue nor how Telstra Wholesale may 'conduct themselves' if there actually is a 'real' separation of their retail and wholesale operations - itself something far from clear at the moment. The other issue is what we would do about buying other services from Telstra Wholesale such as, right now, business fibre services and, in some unknown future time frame, possibly mobile broadband services. While we don't buy a lot of fibre business services from Telstra at the moment (and obviously no mobile broadband services) we are slowly increasing our fibre purchases because, as with ADSL, Telstra provide services in areas where no-one else does. So not any sort of clear cut decisions can be made at this precise moment.
The future of the NBNCo (bearing in mind there is still no 'final' version of the wholesale contract) remains uncertain and it would be a brave (and immensely well informed) person who could spell out how that will actually work out over the next three years. Will NBNCo fibre actually become the only game in residential town? If it does what are the time lines for that to happen and, most importantly, when will the PSTN copper actually cease to exist where and when? Those questions are so difficult to even estimate it makes my head hurt just thinking about them....and as a rapidly increasing user of EOC those questions play a major part in Exetel's future plans.
It is a very difficult period in this always interesting industry.
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