John Linton
....might allow the next two years to be spent more profitably and more interestingly than dithering around in Australia waiting for the dust to settle.
As the current FTTN fiasco proceeds along the easily forecastable lines it was always doomed to do (from the moment those turkeys masquerading as a national government were elected by the 15% below average intelligence people in Australia) I have revived Exetel's interests in using our 'expertise' outside Australia.
Now you may well think that it would be absurd for a tiny company like Exetel that has barely scratched the surface of its target markets in Australia to have the hubris to even briefly consider that it could compete with any sort of larger market in a foreign country - and you may very well be correct.
However you could also look at it another way.
Telstra and the current Labor government and the absurd FTTN 'tender' and the Terria et al vested interests are pretty clearly going to ensure that no decision is reached on what can be done in terms of a "national broadband strategy" (and by the way - no-one needs such a thing as a "national broadband strategy - least of all Australia) for the next two years - at least. In the mean time the various protagonists will do their best to tear each other apart commercially and make what semblance of regulated access to services that now exists seem like 'the good old days' by the end of 2009.
There is no way that a small company like Exetel can invest any real money in Australia until (and even if) the current total uncertainty is resolved and, if the result is really bad, no way to invest even then. The opportunities for Exetel in Australia are limited at the best of times but sufficient for us to continue to make a small contribution to both the Australian economy, keep residential communications services at the lowest 'real' cost for those tens of thousands of Australians who want to use them and, for every day we stay in business, contribute to protecting Australia's flora and fauna and 'atmosphere' by spending a large part of our small profit on the various protection and restoration schemes for endangered species in Australia.
Despite our very small size we do have some quite interesting characteristics that no other Australian, and more importantly from my 'investigations' to date, no other UK company has in providing internet and other related services to their various marketplaces. We are incredibly more efficient than anyone we compete with in Australia and we are therefore able to deliver services at lower costs than any other company (even taking in to consideration other larger companies much better buying power for base services).
Depending on which figures you personally believe, Exetel has around a 1% 'marketshare' of the Australian market which we would expect to continue to slightly increase over the next two years - not a very impressive effort in the wider scheme of things but we had to go through, to some extent are still going through, some very severe growing pains and had to overcome some fairly major 'problems' along the way to reach that tiny market share.
I doubt that if we opened an operation in the UK we would face the same difficulties we faced in setting up Exetel in Australia and I'm pretty sure we would be able to use everything we've developed in Australia, in terms of systems, procedures, automation and the Sri Lankan support services (same time difference between Colombo and London as Colombo and Sydney - just the other way round).
I have done this twice in 'past lives' with nothing like the advantages and knowledge we have now, and on both occasions it was successful so I don't have any real concerns about the 'hows' of doing it. Of course time moves on, marketplaces and perceptions change and I'm certainly no younger - but........
.......there are three times the number of broadband users in the UK and they spend more, on average, than Australian users do and the companies that provide services are as equally inefficient as the Australian service providers - from what I have seen and enquired about.
I have made preliminary enquiries with our legal advisors venture capital partner and yesterday I briefly raised the issue with DeLoittes. From those initial enquiries I doubt that there would be too much trouble raising the money needed to start up a 'trial company' and that may be the best way of investing money (ours and other people's) rather than pursuing the investments we were considering prior to the curse of being saddled with Crazy Kevin and Stupid Stephen and their pointless interference in the Australian communications industry.
Maybe I'm just getting carried away with the imminent set up of Exetel in Sri Lanka but I'm very tempted to see if we could get some financial backing to provide communications services in the EU. I doubt it would take more than $A3 - 5 million to do and that sort of money, even in today's tough investment environment, is easy enough to find.
Perhaps we should just do a pre-trial trial in New Zealand?