John Linton
......as we only have one at the moment (a second one will be delivered late next week) and the one we have must be kept available for the Ambassador or his deputy......
Perhaps not quite what Annette and I wanted to hear from the Austrade official who came to our hotel to advise us of some last minute changes to the visit schedule he had arranged for us based on our requests prior to the trip. His armoured car reference was a post script to his apologies for his inability to accompany us on our first two visits to Sri Lanka government departments on Monday morning as all Embassy personnel had, for safety reasons, been ordered not to go to the 'zone' (that contained all the Sri Lankan government departments) following the suspicious 'road accident' death of an ex-government minister earlier that afternoon who had quit the ruling party and joined the opposition as the most outspoken critic of the current government and particularly the prime minister.
However we spent a pleasant hour over a cup of coffee while he briefed us on the people we were going to meet and the more general background of the current economic and political issues as well as general information about doing business in Sri Lanka. Nice to see our taxes being used effectively even if we did have to pay directly for Austrade's services in organising our particular requirements.
The main offices of the departments we are going to visit first thing tomorrow are housed in the worryingly named "World Trade Centre" which happens to be designed as two twin towers adjacent to each other which are easily the tallest buildings in Colombo's CBD - haven't I heard that building name before somewhere? Oh well...the things we do for Exetel's customer's well being.
We have a very full schedule with 12 separate meetings crammed in to two days which has now been made a little easier with the majority of the first day's meetings (apart from the government ones) being held at the Austrade's offices which will at least cut down the travel time. It could be a very interesting two days aimed at getting a first hand understanding of what, if anything, a small company like Exetel can do in this country in terms of offering services here. We have no doubts, based on the prior research we've done that it will be extremely difficult for us but we have the opportunity of 'pitching' our case to Sri Lanka Telecom with, depending on the outcomes of our previous meetings with the two government departments we will have met with by that time, hopefully some at least tacit support for our proposals.
Why does a tiny company like Exetel think it can do such things? Because we have a very different raison d'etre for operating in Australia which we can demonstrate and our proposal regarding Sri Lanka doesn't involve financial gain for us nor does it involve 'exporting' profits from Sri Lanka but only investing money in to the country. I don't know what sort of reception we will get but we will make a novel, financially and technologically sound proposal that is, at least on a balanced viewpoint, a really sensible thing to do.
If we don't get anywhere then at least we will have tried to solve one of the future 'barriers' that we will have to overcome in the not too distant future and will have closed off one, probably based on our current understanding - the best, solution to overcoming that future barrier. We'll also have visited a city that neither of us have ever been to and will have picked up some useful first hand knowledge about the people we currently employ and the people we may employ in the future. We will also have taken the first, albeit most likely faltering, step in the long and difficult path of making Exetel less vulnerable to operating in a single country where the monopolist telco only has the objective of ensuring our sort of company goes out of business.
I just wish there were less soldiers with automatic weapons and full combat kit in so many, to me - a casual visitor, innocuous looking places.
Come to think of it tomorrow is the 11th.
John Linton
Nothing like getting up at 4.30 am to give you plenty of time to do a day's work. I took the opportunity of the short (3+ hours) flight from Singapore to Sri Lanka to catch up on the Australian press's take on the SPT/TPG merger courtesy of Friday's Australian papers provided by Singapore Airlines. All pretty predictable writing except for the back page analysis piece in the SMH which was a little more informed and erudite than the usual anti-Telstra rant - though there was a bit of that in it.
The consensus seems to be that prior to the appointment of the Tex/Mex Trio the previous Telstra management had been working, relatively effectively and relatively harmoniously, to build a realistic wholesale 'division' that would comply with many of the hopes and a few of the necessities of the Australian Telecommunications Act. This all came to a screaming halt when the TMT ascended the throne with their description of Telstra Wholesale Customers as "parasites" and the immediate dismantling of the relatively competent (at that time) Telstra Wholesale top management and cuts to the TW establishment (and of course the start of the US style 'jihad' aimed at obliterating any form of competition in the Australian communications industry in the name of protecting shareholder's interests (and who can argue with a management team doing that?).
Well spotted - but not exactly news and not really germane to the SPT/TPG merger even throwing in the quotes from Michael Malone that he "sees very little in the small ISP marketplace left to buy" and that therefore "we might have to up our aim to target the larger 'players' left - like Internode and Westnet".
I think that the SMH columnist got it right when he said that Telstra was systematically wiping out the tiny - small ISPs via their wholesale pricing and their 'under the counter' direct marketing to other ISP's customers of 'special pricing' that is way below their web site plan prices and 'bundles'. Pretty sensible really when looked at from Telstra's point of view:
1) The 'bunnies' out there that don't have ADSL go to your web site and sign up for two years on the published high priced plans.
2) The 'smarties' out there who have the opposition's ADSL plans are directly called with a 'special aimed at you only for a short time only' (thus getting under the ACCC's radar) offer at prices way below what the competitor ISP is able to provide.
The article effectively discounted the SPT/TPG merger as any sort of consolidation under pressure (and with TPG claiming 33% EBITDA they certainly are able to deal with any suspected Telstra campaigns) but did re-raise the ongoing demise of so many of the "over 900 independent ISP" statements. It will be interesting to see the ABS ISP survey results later this month to see if there remains any support for this line of thinking.
Anway - none of it made any sense to me and I had other things on my mind but the appositeness of the re-raising of the consequences of communications monopolies re-surfaced a little later in the day.
We landed in Sri Lanka, courtesy of the 2.5 hour time difference, at 8 am in the morning and after a hair raising and very long drive from the airport to our hotel and a brief 'acclimatisation' began interviewing the short listed applicants for the positions we had advertised. Some of the discussions with the applicants included their experiences with ADSL in Colombo and the prices, service choices and service quality. As we already knew (and to be the subject of later discussions with Sri Lanka Telecom and the various associated Sri Lankan government departments) only the government owned telco provides ADSL (no wholesaling) with the predicatable results that the cost (in 'normalised' dollars) is six times what Exetel charge in Australia for a slower service with much lower included downloads that is constantly congested on everything including simple web site browsing.
Doubtless Telstra (Australia) would consider the situation of only having one service provider the ideal way for Australia to operate and perhaps the SMH columnist is right in drawing attention to how Telstra under the TMT have pursued this objective.
I guess time will determine the accuracy of that assessment - Anyone want to bet there's really going to be Crazy Kevin's FTTN any time this decade?