John Linton We had our best 'sales' day yesterday since we increased our prices as part of the 'defence measures' we put in place to deal with the difficulties we anticipated in terms of worsening financial conditions beginning to affect Australia. So with only a few working days left in this calendar year we still see no negative effects on our small business with all indicators showing that we will complete the first six months of the current financial year around 8% ahead of the quite demanding revenue targets we set back in May before there were any indications of the GFC that became evident over the past few months.
We had our last board meeting yesterday marking the end of the first five years that Exetel has been in business. Although we are a very small company with a few shareholders all of whom are also intimately involved in the day to day business we have held formal board meetings each month we have been in business with one exception (when Annette and I were in Europe for the whole of one month). We 'congratulated' ourselves on keeping the company not only in business but in presiding over five years of continual growth and 'declared' a modest dividend based on the strong results for the first six months of FY2009 and opened a bottle of very nice champagne.
Self congratulation duly over we turned back to the realities of the coming months.
Our principal concern is what the latest nonsensical turn in Labor's NBN 'tender' process may mean to small communications companies like Exetel and just how Telstra's ongoing war on the Australian population will now be intensified. Personally I don't find the current iteration of the NBN farce very helpful or defensible even within the context of Stupid Stephen's Alice in Wonderland approach to commercial reality.
While it's pointless to speculate on Telstra's likely new attacks on the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation it seems likely that rejecting Telstra's "bid" for the "NBN" so bluntly is both the wrong thing to have done and the one thing that is likely to ensure the longest possible time frame for any "NBN" to actually be built (for all the reasons that are advanced and argued in the deluge of media reporting on this situation). Exetel doesn't care one way or another as we have always seen the whole "NBN" concept as being totally irrelevant to anything our small company may or may not do over the next three years (other than not to build our own ADSL2 DSLAMs).
What concerns us far more is the likely reactions of Trujillo and McGauchie to this affront to their egos and what those two enemies of the Australian people will now do in terms of their playground bully boy petulance. The punishment the shareholders meted out to Trujillo/McGauchie over the past two days in wiping out around $A12 billion off Telstra's share value will almost certainly continue towards more very real concern about how that duo has not only built shareholder value (the sacred cow they ascribe to all of their attacks on the Australian government and the wider Australian population) their pointless aggression and bullying has now destroyed any value they claimed to have added and then a whole lot more.
So before they are forced out (they clearly haven't "added" shareholder value) what is it they will now do to 'punish' the Federal government for its intransigence and how will that punishment affect Telstra's wholesale customers - and indeed their retail customers?
Sure they may take some sort of legal action on the tender exclusion (remember OPEL?) but the Federal AG and SG would already have provided the required advice and agreed the wording of the rejection - so that will go nowhere and will hold up nothing.
Sure - in the event the "NBN" tender is awarded to someone then Telstra will ensure it takes 'forever' to build with constant further legal action and other tactics.
What will Telstra do in terms of damaging its current 'competition' - particularly the "parasites" who are it's wholesale customers?
I have no idea and no ability to make an intelligent guess but, based on Telstra's actions since Trujillo's/McGaughie's appointment, I doubt that there will be anything positive occurring over the coming 12 months.
We have begun the 'migration' of those ADSL1 customers away from Telstra with the first 300 or so users being 'cut over' today and then another 600 - 1,000 a week each week until the end of January. Assuming that program continues with no operational difficulties we will then increase the transfer rate until all ADSL1 customers who do have an Exetel ADSL2 alternative are moved away from Telstra which will halve the number of ADSL1 customers we currently have.
Assuming that we make some progress with our HSPA negotiations with Optus or some other carrier and the carriers themselves continue to improve the speed and capacities of their HSPA networks we would hope that the vast majority of our ADSL1 customers who don't have access to ADSL2 will have a true HSPA alternative in the not too distant future.
In any event our 'ambition' (it is not yet in any way a formal plan) is to reduce our 'dependence' on Telstra to as close to zero as possible before the end of 2009.
Hopefully we will be able to protect ourselves, and our customers, from any future negative actions by 'commercial predators' - whoever they may turn out to be.