John Linton .....is this truly the beginning of the end of the evil Empire? (apologies to Ronald Reagan and George Lucas)
I finished the details of the HSPA release for later today in terms of the balance of September earlier this morning and now have a 'free' Sunday - which is nice. We will take it very easy for the balance of September to ensure that the systems we have developed over the past three months work fully effectively and that Optus actually has some systems at the other end of the 'line' and actually have everything else in place that I now have more than a few misgivings about.
It seems that Exetel and me in particular have been looking to put an HSPA service in place for as long as Exetel has existed which is pretty true as I never believed that Exetel, or any other very small start up company had any long term future based on being invoved in a monopoly's sourced services. It was only 7 months after Exetel 'opened for business' that we signed a five year contract to offer the Unwired wireless service in Sydney (at that time the service was planned to expand to every capital city in Australia and several major regional areas).
Unfortunately that didn't work out and nor did the several other start up Australian wireless options we looked at over the past four years. I've commented before in these ramblings about the frustrations, brick walls and too soon to be snuffed out hopes raised and dashed as I loooked for wireless solutions in Australia and then in Asia and the USA and finally in the EU.
While we still have almost 1,000 Unwired customers in Sydney, and some of those are well in to their fourth year of using the service, Unwired itself never ever got its 'go to market' strategies, or even tactics, right and employed a series of lamentably under qualified drones to waste tens of millions of dollars producing one of the worst examples of butchering a good idea that, for once was very well funded, ever seen in Australia - on a much smaller scale it ranks as Australia's entry (Motorola's Iridium satellite project stands supreme and unqestioned as the all time winner) for the award of the greatest f*** up of a truly great concept by dopey people in communications history.
HSPA has all the key ingredients to become a 'quantum leap' or a 'paradigm shift' or a 'sea change' or whatever stupid tag someone or other wants to apply to the relentless progress of technology. Just as mobile telephony is driving wire line telephony in to a 'niche' in voice communications, HSPA, and LTE, have the same potential and, unlike all previous 'attempts to break down the Telstra monopoly' - the fact that HSAP/LTE is a 'standard' and world wide change across all markets and, in Australia is supported by all mobile carriers - there appears to be no going back from here.
So - as Harry Callaghan once said in the early 1970s - "how lucky do you feel?"
Apart from all the other uncertainties introduced in to the HSPA release over the past few days the one great unknown is - of course - how many of these services will people buy from Exetel? Normally in using a base service and adding value to it this is not a major concern. With HSPA there is a concern and that is the 'investment' needed to be made in HSPA hardware and, where that hardware should be sourced to ensure that when someone orders a service we have the hardware required.
If we were to source hardware to cover the high end of our forecast of our HSPA sales we would need to set aside/find more than $A1.5 million 'up front' which is 'doable' but tough for a small company. The risks (if sales are much less than forecast) are quite considerable to our cashflow and as we have never used debt to operate our business takes us to new 'ground' and levels of concern.
We have taken a very cautious approach and we desperately need real figures to be able to make realistic decisions over the next 6 weeks in terms of the number of modems we need to source and where we need to source them from. It's unlikely that OPtus will prove to be an effective source because of their high prices and long delivery times (their delivery is 3 - 4 times longer than actually getting the units direct from the same factory!).
So maybe I won't get my 'free Sunday' after all.