John Linton
One of Exetel's first suppliers was Powertel with whom we enjoyed the best relationship we had with any supplier until Powertel was bought out by AAPT/NZ Telecom. Subsequently all the 'Powertel' people we had built up a four year relationship with quickly left and the people who replaced them were, to be as kind as I can be, "unused to dealing with wholesale customers" as one of them once said to me. It's always a pity when good suppliers get taken over by much larger companies but it's a commercial reality so a sensible buyer attempts to build new relationships as best they can.
We made every attempt to persevere with the relationship with the new people until, in our views in February of 2008 - not just mine as I had by that time ceased to have any dealings with any AAPT employee, were that we were doing increasing damage to our business as AAPTs "new" procurement and provisioning and fault resolution systems and the people employed to operate and manage them were hopelessly inadequate and were causing the customers we provided AAPT services to a significant number of problems that were taking weeks (some times more than a month) to resolve.
So we ceased providing ADSL2 services from AAPT to new users, until they sorted out the remaining provisioning problems with the outstanding installations and gave them no more business until they had sorted out their issues in a demonstrable way. Our view, at that time, was that not only were the AAPT people and systems completely inadequate but that their decision to wholesale the iiNet DSLAMs was a major mistake and we could see it accounted for over 90% of the problems that we ended up causing our end users - if AAPT's processes and people were sub-standard trying to interpose those sub standard people and processes between us and the even more sub-standard iiNet wholesaling processes made the whole mess an irresoluable nightmare.
So we politely advised Powertel/AAPT that we would wait until they had sorted out their problems and when they could demonstrate that was the case we would consider using their ADSL2 services again as we did like their SSS solution (when it was delivered from their own exchanges) because it was fast, reliable and gave the end user the option of maintaining their telephone line with the provider of their choice. It certainly cost us business and it cost us business at a time when it was not a good thing to happen - but to do anything else would have been very wrong.
Of course, the first 'dead line' to provide a new working procurement process was missed as was the second and the third and then we stopped thinking about any sort of time frame and proceeded on the basis that we would not deal with them again. Yesterday (some 6 months later than the original "every thing will be resolved by date") Powertel came to meet with our head of provisioning and (just as importantly our head of regulatory as the TIO complaints from AAPT stuff ups accounted for over 50% of all TIO complaints yet the level of business was around 10% of new installs at the time) and after the latest demonstration they were of the opinion that Powertel might have resolved all of the problems with their systems - at least as they related to non-iiNet exchanges.
So I had a pleasant chat to the new account manager and an 'old' Powertel manager, who left them when AAPT took over but has now returned, and we agreed to re-look at what they had to offer late next week but we couldn't consider ever using the iiNet DLSAM network. They said they had a better solution now which was 'mysterious' but I guess it will become clear next week.
I may have misheard what was being said but I got the impression that AAPT wanted to provide us with not only their previous ADSL2 coverage but a much enhanced coverage (that, if I heard correctly, didn't involve iiNet's DSLAMs) but was much 'wider' - maybe I've missed something in the news over the past six months or maybe they've been very quiet about it.
I would like to be able to offer an ADSL2 solution that allows the end user to use the wire line provider of their choice and I will be interested to see how AAPT can offer a wider ADSL2 network than Optus does - if in fact I heard that claim correctly. I'm not sure for how long the 'marketplace' will see an advantage of renting a wire line telephone service from a different provider to their Internet service but it still seems to be a preference for a sizable percentage of prospective customers.
As we have now finalized the new ADSL1 'pre-paid plans' it would be useful to us if we could provide them via a non-Telstra Wholesale basis and if there is a viable choice then it would be good to stop giving Telstra not only our money but full details of each one of our ADSL1 customers.
Mind you - I never get my hopes up before I read any possible offer in the draft contract.