John Linton
Having got home late last night I read the Australian papers over a late breakfast this morning and noticed the same old Telstra aggression - this time in trying to over turn the last federal government's decision to attempt to have someone other than Telstra install comunications infrastructure in some of the less serviced regional areas of Australia.
You'd think that Telstra would have better things to do with the massive amounts of money it makes (the only way you can actually pay the legal bills that Telstra runs up every year I suppose) than pay lawyers to attempt to put competitors out of business - like deploy a faster broadband service in the same areas that the previous government had to help fund someone else to do because Telstra claimed it was uneconomical for them as they had to "protect their shareholder's interests".
When I can be bothered I'll look up Telstra's last annual report and see if there is a separately published line item for legal costs.
The recent Telstra action struck a chord with me based on some recent, to me disturbing, results of Exetel's ongoing development of supplier bill checking systems.
Exetel is currently running more advanced checks on the bills we have received from Telstra over the past twelve months using the latest version of our Telstra bill checking software that is far more sophisticated than the previous version. The first full testing we did on the latest Telstra Wholesale bill seemed to indicate that we had been overcharged by more than $A50,000 for that month - though that has yet to be validated. However much of that overcharging is likely to prove correct as it included almost 1,000 ADSL1 services that don't 'belong to Exetel' as well as errors, all in Telstra Wholesale's favour, in 5 other categories.
I'd really hate to think that this initial analysis proves to be correct and, worse, that a similar quantum of errors in Telstra's favour have occurred on the bills we have been paying in full for the past 33 months.
The reason I was surprised at this result (disturbed is a more accurate adjective) is that I first became involved in the comunications industry some 15 years ago as part of a group of individuals making a living from checking Telecom (as it was then) bills on the basis that the employing company paid a percentage of the errors found (and subsequently credited) as the consulting fee - the actual work was done on a no charge basis. It paid handsomely for over a year until I lost interest in such a mundane way of making a living.
One of the things I noticed in those days was that the Telecom bills were almost always incorrect but the errors on the bills were almost always equally divided between errors in the customer's favour and errors in Telecom's favour resulting in a pretty much break even net difference over the months. There were exceptions to this and one that I remember was when TPG was billed for a large number of lines, and their charges, that belonged to Rank Xerox.
However, in checking carrier bills, other than Telstra's (which we have only just begun to do seriously as I was of the opinion that any errors would split evenly between for and against as they did in those long ago years) over the past 4 years there appears to be only errors made against Exetel with virtualy no errors in our favour. Statistically that can't be the result of random errors (which are understandable in large software implementations) and it wouldn't need a much more suspicious person than I am to believe that some large suppliers have interesting policies regarding how they construct their billing systems.
It's disappointing to have to spend so much time, resource and therefore money on checking the bils submitted by suppliers but if we had not done this over the past year we would probably not be in business today as our credits (received not just claimed) have amounted to over 4% of the total amounts billed to us - a staggering error rate.
I was interested to learn in the discussions I had in both Sri Lanka and Singapore last week that none of the four comms companies we talked with did anything like the bill checking we do and none of them have bothered to write separate checking systems for each of their supliers. None of them had the level of automation of this process that we have struggled to build over the past four years. Each one of them expressed interest in sending someone to Australia to see how we do it. "Strangely trusting people" was the thought that crossed my mind each time this was raised. Then again maybe the carriers in their countries have more accurate billing systems where any errors net out over time.
It also occurred to us on the flight home yesterday that the comms companies we talked with expressed a great deal of interest in talking further to us about many of the automated systems we have developed and were quite 'pressing' in asking for more details on some of the things we do, particularly:
Fully automating the collection of payment defaults
Logging faults automatically by telephone with call back updates to the customer
The combination of P2P Fitering and Caching
Automatated load balancing between multiple bandwidth providers
The Exetel User Facilities tools and services
The Exetel Forum concepts and processes
The Exetel web site sales and information methods and processes
and many other systems we have developed over the past four years.
On consideration maybe I'll overcome my distaste for the mundane nature of selling bill checking services and make our various software automations a product/service set to be provided to large users of communications services?