John Linton
There is little doubt, at least as far as I'm concerned, that the communications marketplaces in Australia are fiercely competitive and likely to only get more 'competitive'. Not really any problem as I don't think that has changed all that much since I've been involved from the early days of 'de-regulation' and even before that.
We have built Exetel as an ultra low operating cost communications company with an enormous degree of automation handling almost every aspect of our operations with ambitious plans over the remainder of calendar 2008 to further automate those processes. Another thing we have built in to Exetel is the ability for almost all positions to be run 'remotely' from anywhere across the globe that has a reliable dsl connection.
I've mentioned in these musings that we have had two help desk engineers working from their homes in Sri Lanka for almost two years now and that Annette and I will be going to Colombo later this week to do the final hiring interviews for two additional engineers. However the main purpose of the trip (facilitated by Austrade) is to meet with a dozen companies and government departments to determine exactly what is involved in Exetel actually providing ISP, VoIP and Data services locally in Colombo.
The preliminary information I have gathered over the past 12 months indicates that it's a very difficult thing to do and that may well prove to be the case in Sri Lanka but I'm very interested to look at how it may be possible to sell services in an 'undeveloped' (and I mean no disrespect by trying to find the right adjective to use) country along the same lines that we set up Exetel to compete in Australia - offering the advantage of the lowest possible cost communication services to end users in competition to a dominant and predatory incumbent 'national' carrier.
From my, far from exhaustive, research of the telco situations in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and even Korea there are obviously some opportunities for a 'foreign' comms company that the local equivalents may not be able to offer in quite the same ways if it was possible to develop a sensible relationship with the National carrier (something quite impossible to do in Australia).
Of course, Exetel has a really tough time in front of it to just survive let alone prosper in Australia and we would be stretched (in the extreme) to find the correct personnel resources to negotiate such arrangements and then carry them out. The only reason I ever considered doing such things was the very cold blooded view that Telstra will continue to make it impossible for a company such as Exetel to really grow beyond being a very small communications company in Australia and I have more ambition than that (and yes, I know, I should have grown out of such aspiratons at my advanced age - but, for whatever reason, I haven't).
Sydney is blessed with a diverse migrant population and many of the children of those migrants graduate from Sydney's better electronics degree courses. Exetel has always had a preferred hiring policy of IT/Comms degree qualified people for all positions in the company and not unexpectedly we therefore have a wide range of people who come from many of the countries SE Asia and the Gulf regions. In the event we ever did decide to set up in another country we would be able to deal quite easily with any initial language issue.
We are planning on adding a PoP in Perth later this year and when you look at the costs of doing that (which can be looked at as adding a network node over 3,000 kms from the Sydney location) it begins to put into focus that adding a node in Colombo or Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh city is very little more complex or difficult.
As far as I can see only Telstra stands in the way of Australians having better, more productive and lower cost communications services in Australia. I imagine, from what I have read, that similar scenarios may exist in other countries in our 'region' but they may not exert quite the same all encompassing negative influences. Quite possibly that's my ignorance and naivety but later this week Exetel will take the first, very tentative, steps to seeing if a better world can be created or whether the dead hand of monopolist self interest by third rate people exists everywhere.