John Linton I already use an Exetel HSPA service for my mobile phone - using VoIP/Fring to make all calls and Exetel's SMS over IP for all messaging. I bought myself (and yes I pay for my and my family's Exetel services) a second HSPA service for my note book as I will take the opportunity of 'the quiet period' to travel to some parts of Australia I've never seen. Like the mobile service the purely data service syncs at 7.2 mbps at my home (Sydney's lower North Shore) and delivers a very solid performance on my limited application needs. (Intranet/some browsing/email/YouTube testing). I used an HSPA service for 3 weeks in the UK earlier this year and was very impressed with the coverage in that country (those countries) and I'm really interested in seeing what happens when I use the Exetel/Optus service in some of the remoter areas of Australia.
Exetel has been offering HSPA for 3 months now, though we haven't promoted it in any way and have only recently released the full mobile service in terms of the full suite of additional mobile telephone services. We are getting close to 1,000 activated users which we expect to reach by early January and, in December to date, HSPA services account for around 15% of total broadband orders. This is a little lower than we had hoped for but the lack of the full mobile telephone feature set accounts for most of the shortfall. As I have referenced previously the ABS statistics show that 'wireless' broadband accounted for around 50% of new broadband connections over the last twelve months of their reporting period which is quite a startling statistic.
The other really interesting statistic is that over 85% of the HSPA customers to date are buying their first service from Exetel and the second interesting statistic is that almost 40% of HSPA buyers buy a second (or even a third) HSPA service within a month of buying the first service. A third really interesting 'statistic' is that, despite the best efforts of the 'Optus Haters' in the childish sections of the Australian media, there are virtually no user 'disappointment' stories either on our forums or on our support/ticket services. In fact quite the opposite - with an increasing number of people expressing their satisfaction that the service performs better/faster than they had expected - and since Optus began to upgrade to 7.2 mbps this level of satisfaction has further increased.
At least three Optus personnel have bought an HSPA service from Exetel and have confirmed that the speed on the Exetel/Optus HSPA service is still around double of that achieved on the Optus/Virgin or Optus Retail HSPA service but none of them, despite what they say is a 'thorough' internal investigation, have any explanation as to why that is still the case. We would prefer them to actually 'solve' whatever the problem is (as long as it doesn't involve 'throttling' the Exetel HSPA performance back to their own performance levels) to get rid of the criticisms that continue to appear about their HSPA services which obviously negatively affects our version of their HSPA service.
Our plans for 2009 are to sell a net 30,000 HSPA services in Australia with the majority of those sales coming from the business sectors of the Australian marketplaces. This is an ambitious target with the increasingly troubled financial conditions in this country making the setting of any growth targets something of a gamble. Based on sales to date we would have no hope of reaching even half that target but our sales to date of HSPA services have been limited by all the factors that are present in the 'launch' of any new service and in this case were severely hampered by the 3 month delay in getting the service to market at all - thus throwing our promotion strategies completely out of 'whack'. We will have to be very innovative and work very, very hard to achieve our ambitions for the HSPA service but, if we can get most of the strategies right, then we have some reasonable chance of making it.
One of the strategies that will have a major effect on us reaching the planned target is how sucessful we can be in 'persuading' our current 256 and 512 low usage ADSL1 customers to move to HSPA - particularly in regional areas of Australia.We have more than 20,000 of those sort of customers and, in theory, it shouldn't be that difficult for a large percentage of those cstomers to see the advantage of much higher speeds at much lower costs by moving from low speed ADSL to 4 - 8 times greater speed at around half their current monthly ADSL1 costs. However, it will need to be a very carefully orchestrated 'campaign.
The other strategy/marketing campaign we have to get right is to address non-Exetel users who use a competitor's ADSL1 services to make the move to HSPA and that will be much more difficult - but then the target marketplace is 50 to 100 times larger than simply addressing our own customer base and the cost differences will also be larger. Pitting HSPA against Telstra, and its minion's, ADSL2 services will be an interesting exercise.
It will be interesting to see what Telstra do in the new year and how quickly they upgrade their HSPA network in terms of speed and coverage. It will also be interesting to see how Vodafone and Three ramp up their HSPA offerings and how/if they change their current 'product positionings'.Of course, it will also be interesting to see how the rapid growth in HSPA usage affects the various network's capacities to deal with the volumes the armchair network experts say HSPA can't cope with.
I'm really looking forward to getting to grips with these challenges.....after spending so long getting a Layer 2 HSPA service in place.