Thursday, April 30. 2009Why Is Commercial Life One Long Re-Think?......John Linton ......or is it just my inability to properly understand situations in the first place? Perhaps its just old age and all the failings that the decades bring - particularly in the technology industry where everything keeps changing - where everything continues to change, if not on a daily basis, then more frequently than I seem to be able to adequately deal with these days. I keep dithering on when Exetel should start one or more of the initiatives for promoting the HSPA service in regional Australia. When we finally got HSPA operational last August (after an almost three year search for a wireless solution) we had plans to spend up to Christmas 2008 getting every aspect of provisioning, support and 'positioning' correct and then seriously promoting the wireless service in late January 2009. Well, as you may have noticed, it's late April 2009 now - very late April, and we haven't started. This is partly due to the delay in finding a suitable Yagi antenna and mainly due to not bringing ourselvs to make the financial commitmets to obtain a sensible price for the modem. Pricing from Optus is far too high for us to be able to widely promote the service and compete with Optus Retail and Optus/Virgin (let alone Optus/Dodo with their 'free' approach to the market and their) together with those entities saturation advertising. My friends in the EU can solve our modem price roblems but we don't have enough money to pay for 10,000 modems up front even at their very, very low asking price. We can get modems by buying direct from one of several factories in the PRC but their prices,while much lower than sourcing from Optus, aren't really at the point where it makes financial sense to base a major (for Exetel) promotional campaign on a price point that would hurt us financially but what is, we think, needed. Some time in the next few days we will get the 'final' quotes for the units we are interested in and will, more importantly, get the delivery into Australia dates and then we will make the tough decision of whether we are brave enough to invest heavily in buying in bulk for our own needs (both aerials and modems) and also fund the cost of promoting the services. As the total costs will be somewhere in the vicinity of $A2 million over the period of the promotion it isn't a decision we will find easy to make (while $A2 million is probably only a week or so of advertising for our competitors it is a huge investment/risk for us). The other risk is our view that we will concentrate our 'promotional' activities in the 700 (of 1,013) regional/rural areas that fall outside even the most exaggerated version of the Krudd NBN2 wild fantasy. Our thinking is summed up here - but we reached this conclusion amost a year ago: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25389258-7583,00.html While making perfect sense as a strategy we are struggling to develop interest in terms of finding suitable agents in those areas and have now got to decide on a Plan C for making that a reality - if in fact it is possible at all which based on our lack of success to date is a pretty big question. So, perhaps I'm not the right person to be playing a major part in making these decisions to risk so much money and resources attempting to outperform the other 'me too' offerors of HSPA services around Australia? In the 'old days' I wouldn't have given these problems a tenth of the time and 'thinking' I now do and would have made a go/no go decision months ago. By dithering and procrastinating all I've managed to do is to waste any 'early bird' advantage Exetel may have had and also given away much of the 'novelty' value..... ,,,though we have learned some new methods of procurement which, if we are to sustain a wireless business over the coming years, will be essential to build and then widen our 'lowest cost provider' abilities to always provide the lowest end user plan prices which will be very necessary to deal with the 'me tooers' that will soon infest the HSPA marketplaces in the ways that the ADSL marketplaces now operate. To maintain a cost advantage in the HSPA marketplaces will need something that should be impossible for a very small company like Exetel to achieve (and something we could never achieve in the ADSL marketplaces we operate in). So having already made the brave, financial and operational, decision to invest in an operation in Sri Lanka and yesterday parting with close to $A2 million of our scarce personal resources to settle the purchase of new office space for Exetel in North Sydney is added another 'brave' decision on the future direction of Exetel in the residetial marketplaces in which we operate (not forgetting the quite considerable investments we have started to make in building a corporate sales and support business). Sometimes there are just too many major decisions (on top of the myriad day to day, but significant, decisions required to operate a small but growing business) for any one of them to get the required concentrated and detailed attention required. Then again it's more likely to be a slowing metabolism and a fading mind. Wednesday, April 29. 2009The Lunatically Doctrinairely Uneducated And Stupid Australian Labor Party......John Linton ....everything they do in areas that I understand (NBN, Internet 'Filtering') makes absolutely no sense and makes running a small Australian communications business more difficult.....God knows what is happening in the other million areas I don't understand....I assume the same level of crazy ineptitude is destroying every other area in Australian life. I received this email, via the suggestion box, earlier this morning: "I suggest you cancel your trial of internet censorship. I am writing to let you know that if you proceed with your trial of internet censorship I am going to find a new ISP. I appreciate the fact that you let me know. I understand that it might have been motivated by technical research. However I cannot support an ISP that voluntarily censors my internet. I have been a long term customer and apart from this I am very happy with the Exetel service. So I am very sad that you have taken this course. I am going to start searching for an new ISP tonight. I sincerely hope you will reconsider the trial before I find my new ISP so I do not have to churn. I hope you appreciate the feedback from a long term customer who befroe this has recommended you and referred many clients to your services. I look forward to your response." To which I responded: "Dear Sir, You must, of course, do whatever you consider to be in your own best interests. Exetel must do what it considers to be in its, and its almost 100,000 customers, including you, best interests. We are NOT Censoring the Internet and for you to describe our five day trial of a piece of technology to mitigate any subsequent actions by the Australian Labor party in such terms is ridiculous. Neither you, nor any other customer's internet can be "censored" by Exetel - and it never will be. It can be censored by the Australian Labor Party and if that comes about then Exetel must comply with Australian law but, and this is the point of the trial, we will comply with the Australian law in a way that technically imposes the least performance burden on our customers. For you to change suppliers has not changed, in any way, what will happen to your internet service should the Australian Labor Party proceed with its current insane policies on "internet filtering" - all you will do is to disadvantage yourself by ceasing to use a service that has, apparently, suited you very well for some time. John Linton" Now, I think I can be reasonably described as 'fairly scathing' in my opinions of the Labor Party's various ludicrous and lunatic 'initiatives' so to be put in a position of losing long term customers because of their more phantasmagorical stupidities is 'annoying'. It's obvious that this ALP nonsense was forced on them by the Religious Loony in the Senate but that is no excuse for potentially screwing up a major service because they need to get their more contentious legislation passed. The NBN1 and now NBN2 (NBN = No Broadband - Never) 'back of a bus ticket' election winning sound byte "policies" have ensured ADSL2 roll outs stopped dead and are unlikely to be re-started in any meaningful way in the near future (despite the generalistic mutterings of a couple of the companies who have committed to this technology). As everybody with more than one brain cell knows - "internet filtering" can never work and it MUST have some, as yet unknown, impact on the performance of any internet network which is mealy mouth speak for making the service more expensive to deliver. While the Labor Party is already bankrupting, more accurately has already bankrupted, the country and will shortly raise taxes to try and keep itself marginally solvent, the twin lunacies of the NBN2 and the IF are bringing the residential data service industry to a halt. It's obvious that the IF is so ridiculously stupid and unworkable that it would have had to be abandoned by now if it was going to be abandoned (and I suppose it still might be). However the humiliating back down by Krudd and Stupid Stephen on their NBN1 election promise has made that very much more difficult. Can Krudd get away with two "key" election promise back downs without even the dumb Australian electorate noticing? Just how dumb is the Australian electorate and the also not so bright Australian media?...pretty dumb based on the reaction to their acceptance of Krudd's "I knew NBN1 was never going to work but here's my back of half a bus ticket grand eight year vision for NBN2 designed to get me re-elected at least once and if you're really as dumb as you've proved to be so far - it could be good for twice". Why did no media 'interviewer ever ask him why, if he always knew it would never work did he: a) Propose it in the first place in March 2007? b) let a pointless and expensive evaluation process go on until April 2009 before admitting it was pointless? There is no credible answer to either of those questions except one. So when a small company like Exetel try's to mitigate any future damage caused to our customers by the actual go ahead of the IF lunacy (in the most understated and non-impacting way possible) we run the risk of losing long term customers....just as we have we have already lost thousands of customers due to the NBN1 ending the Optus ADSL2 roll outs.What is the most feared comment you can ever hear? Some thing like - "We're from the government and we're here to help you". ...and if the Australian electorate votes Labor again in the next election (after the current disastrous three year period it's hard to see how that could be possible but as Ms Gump once observed - "Stupid is as Stupid does") - then it may not be worthwhile continuing to run a communications business in Australia ........"Where did you put those truck drivers school applications, Mav?" Tuesday, April 28. 2009It's Red Queen Time Again......John Linton ........remember her and one of her early morning regimens? I'm still trying to figure out why Optus is trying to make a case for providing us with 3.6 mbps modems to replace the current 7.2 mbps HuaWei U169s we have been supplying for over six months. I think I have a reasonable mind but when a carrier is upgrading its HSPA network to 7.2 mbps (and competing with other carriers who are banging the drums about providing 21 mbps plus speeds real soon now) why is Optus trying to tell Exetel that "there is only wholesale demand for a lower cost modem and that can only be provided at a maximum speed of 3.6 mbps"?? Exetel has always been a/the pioneer of Optus services (April 2005 wholesale ADSL1, July 2006 wholesale ADSL2 and August 2008 wholesale/Layer 2 HSPA) but I see that now much bigger 'independent ISPs' such as Westnet/iinet and Internode are "announcing" they are now providing HSPA services (and in very little print "using Optus Wholesale access to the Optus HSPA service"). I can never understand just why these companies make the decisions they do and the odd timing of their decisions. However the pricing these 'large' companies are putting to market are just plain stupid - higher than Optus Retail, Optus/Virgin and, of course, Exetel who pioneered the Layer 2 service for Optus back in August 2008. So what's this all about? Dodo, that exemplar of a service provider, offers HSPA (on the Optus network) for "nothing" - plus the fine print - and Virgin offers Optus HSPA at retail prices below Exetel's wholesale buy cost. So now Internode and Westnet, who obviously are far larger than Exetel belatedly announce they are also going to provide an Optus HSPA service but are pricing it more expensively than every other Optus HSPA service from Optus Retail on down. What 'added value' do either Internode or Westnet provide that Optus and Optus/Virgin don't already offer? Maybe I'm naive and ill informed but I don't see how any wholesaler of the Optus HSPA service can provide anything on the basic service that can improve on the Optus HSPA network and providing the IP connectivity fits into the same category. Internode/Westnet/Dodo are simply providing the same service at their selected pricing options (Dodo dirt cheap but riddled with fine print - Internode/Westnet incredibly expensive and with nothing added.......other than their self importance. ......and now Optus is telling Exetel that their wholesale customers want lower priced modems and believe a slower speed specification isn't an issue. Exetel is a wholesale customer and has never made any such comment and we believe the reverse of that (but as Optus wholesale HSPA customers have said that lower spec modems are required obviously Exetel doesn't count as a wholesale customer as I'm very sure we were never asked) - we believe most customers want a speed that matches Telstra's and Vodafone's - I suppose it isn't really an issue if either: a) As a carrier you believe your network can never deliver better than 3.6 despite publicly stating you're upgrading it to 7.2 mbps (and there are places you can get 4 - 5 mbps at the moment on those upgraded towers) so only providing a cheaper modem, much lower specified modem, is OK. b) Your wholesale customers really did say they only wanted a slower speed modem (and you didn't bother to ask Exetel because we aren't a wholesale customer) and they could sell more services if the 'entry price' was cheaper (despite the fact that everyone is already offering a $0.00 entry price anyway on a 24 month contract and with plan prices already below Exetel's costs). I have a major problem in believing a) above has any credibility and would dismiss it after less than a few seconds thought. I wouldn't have thought b) had any validity either but using the Sherlock Holmes principle of ...."when you have eliminated everything else what remains, no matter how improbable....." I have been talking to O2 and Vodafone wholesalers in the UK over the last week or so who are telling me they can't give away U169s as the EU networks move to 10 mbps and well above that speed - resulting in 7.2 mbps modems being 'warehouse filler' and available in bulk for a quarter of the current ex factory price. I assume that Optus could buy in enough quantity to solve both their "wholesale customer's need for a lower priced modem" without downgrading the 7.2 mbs speed that currently matches the network speeds. On the other hand the new graduate sales trainees are doing very well selling SHDSL and, particularly Ethernet, services to medium and medium/large businesses and it seems to me that that risk has proven to be well worth taking and will produce far better results than trying to figure out residential wholesale cloud cuckoo land scenarios. If they continue their astonishing rate of progress we will hire 4 more to start when we complete the move to the new premises. I suppose that it's yet another example of why Exetel shouldn't remain in the residential ISP business - we are just too small and irrelevant and need to find a way of overcoming that massive disadvantage or just fade away and concentrate on providing services to business customers.....either that or maybe just find a more rational provider.....I have not got a clue what the current scenario means. Monday, April 27. 2009Time For Old Dogs To Learn New 'Tricks'John Linton Advertising is something that Exetel has never done. In the five years it has taken to grow the company to the level it's at today we have deemed it much better to spend any money we had on building the infrastructure that was required by most of the data services and trying to ensure we had more than enough transit and switching capacities for our constantly growing customer numbers and as we more easily achieved those capabilities we then spent any 'spare' money on strengthening the duplication and redundancy of the infrastructure. We have been following this 'policy' for so long it seems very strange that we have been looking at 'advertising' for the past few months as part of our 'counter-cyclical' approach to the "recession". Our original concept was that we would build such a perfect network and deliver such a perfect service to our customers that we would never need any marketing or advertising because word of mouth alone would deliver us all the customer growth we could ever want.....a very naive view as it has turned out. Apart from the many, many mistakes we have made ourselves virtually every supplier we have ever had has, either intentionally or by their own incompetence or greed, ensured that we have delivered far less than perfect services in different geographic locations far too often for us to have achieved our goal of providing perfect services. So our original 'lily pond' theory that we would be able to grow at an increasingly faster rate by simply getting more customers who would recommend us to even more customers has worked but not as well as it would have if we had not encountered so many problems of our own making and many more made for us. Starting with the mistake of helping Lorraine Rose get started in business and putting her in the position of cutting off service supply to almost 60% of our then customer base in April 2005 there have been a continual series of poor to dreadful provisioning times by a range of other suppliers in, on occasions, quite wide areas of the delivery networks over which we can exercise absolutely no control. Irrespective of the errors/mistakes/stupidities/greediness perpetrated by our suppliers we have certainly not achieved the levels of perfection we aspired to on more than a few occasions over the past five years. So for all these reasons, while our business has always grown and at this point in time is growing more strongly than it has for a very long while, we believe we should be able to grow the basic services more strongly as times get more difficult. We have no knowledge of what rates other ISPs are growing and the only source of vaguely meaningful statistics are provided by the ABS whose latest report indicated slowing growth in ADSL and much faster growth in wireless broadband. Exetel's ADSL grows at around 25% a year which is, if the ABS statistics are accurate, means we grow about 2.5 times the 'average' but because we are so very small that is much easier for us to do - obviously if Telstra grew by 25% they would have 100% of the market within three years as an example. Why would we want to do this - grow the business faster than it currently 'naturally' grows at? Basically there is only one reason which is to increase our buying 'power' to ensure we can keep offering the lowest possible cost services to all current and future customers. Right now we are simply too small to be taken seriously by major suppliers and while that has been 'O K' for the past five years it's becoming a negative issue more often than it once was. If we don't do something to move away from being a 'small wholesale customer' we will have too many problems in the not too distant future. My personal view is that there is no place for a company of Exetel's size in the Australian market and if we had set up Exetel for purely commercial reasons then we would have exited this business a long time ago. Having said that, Exetel is governed by commercial imperatives and among those are the need to be a 'bigger buyer' from your main suppliers. I, personally, have zero skills in managing/designing advertising campaigns and even less knowledge of how to budget for them but do have a basic understanding of where to go to get sensible advice. While Exetel still makes very little money from its operations (by intention - I'm not complaining about that situation) we could spend a realistic amount of money on a campaign if we could see that it would make enough money to pay for itself as we have a little more 'reserve than we have ever previously had as we ensure that whatever 'bad financial times' are to come we have some protection against whatever happens. So, it may be possible for us to risk some of that reserve on testing the efficacy of advertising to produce a higher level of growth for our overall business in these times where, if counter-cyclical financial theory is true, there are more opportunities for smaller companies to grow than in 'good financial times' when large companies 'swamp' any thing smaller companies can do with their huge advertising spends and their give away promotions. Perhaps I'm just as naive about this aspect of commercial life as I have been about delivering 'perfect' services. As far as I can see most advertising costs far more money than Exetel could scrape together but equally it also seems to me that companies such as Dodo and TPG only continue to exist, let alone grow, because of their successful approaches to advertising and (I assume) the financial support their suppliers provide to them. So we will re-look at our current plans for advertising/promoting the HSPA services in various ways and also look at directionally promoting our ADSL2 services to 'pensioners' and one or two other specific demographics. My original preference was to spend what ever money we allocated via our regional dealers but that hasn't been a success so far though we will make more efforts between now and the end of this financial year. Whether they will be successful is pure speculation and I really have no idea. Whatever we do in terms of advertising will not be 'huge' - we simply don't have that sort of money available to us but we will do something which is more than we have done in our first five years. PS: Another of P J O'Rourke's observations particularly applicable to the Krudd/Whine handling of the Australian economy I thought I would share with you:
Sunday, April 26. 2009Country Australia - Still The 'Real' AustraliaJohn Linton Annette and I took a day off on Friday to travel to Benalla in Victoria to visit one of the fauna protection/regeneration programs that Exetel supports. Not wanting to face the eight - nine hour drive from Sydney (two ways in three days) we flew to Melbourne and rented a car which cut the drive to something less than two or so hours. Since I first arrived in Australia I have always loved 'country Australia' more than I have ever been able to develop a fondness for the two Australian cities I have lived in and even a 'quick as a flash' trip like this reminded me of why that has always been the case. Friendly people, everyone you talk to treats you like a friend you have lost touch with, and a care and regard for other people that is simply missing in city dwellers. It was raining cats and dogs for most of the trip up the Hume Freeway from the airport so my views of the 'country side' were basically the back spray from the rear tires of the semis and other vehicles we overtook but it eventually cleared up as we approached Benalla - a town I haven't been to for over 30 years (since I sold a computer to the local credit union - which is still there! the credit union not the computer). Everything about the town had changed, of course, but we went to the pub I vaguely remembered next to the railway station and Carton Draught from the tap still tastes good. We had booked in to a b and b close to the town centre and had dinner in a recommended local restaurant (a far cry from the 'cafe' I remember) and had an excellent meal with a local wine (Stanton and Killeen Durif) I had only tasted once in my life before - much better year and one third of the price I last paid. The barman made me a Martini to my instructions and when it wasn't quite right, without prompting he tried again and got it just right and we had a running conversation throughout the meal about drinks he had made in different places at different times and qualities, failings and triumphs of the local and fast growing wine industry (now becoming more well known for wine other than the Morris and Stanton and Killeen reserve Muscats and Tokays. The meal was exceptional and it is a delight to eat sophisticated food the ingredients of which were grown a few kilometers from your dining table though the quantities, as in every country town I've ever eaten in, remain of truly challenging proportions. We had no trouble sleeping that night. On Saturday we drove out to the 'meeting place' where some 80 - 100 volunteers (many from Melbourne, particularly the universities, but also people from Ballarat and Bendigo and other places in the immediate district) were assembling to be given their instructions and directions for the inspection of around 270 (out of 410) 'nesting boxes' provided in an attempt to increase the rapidly diminishing populations of squirrel gliders, sugar gliders and brush tailed phascogales. The briefing by the project leader (Ray Thomas and his 2 i/c) was thorough, informative and devoid of 'padding' and after each designated leader had loaded their 10 meter ladder off we went under lowering skys and rain showers for a day in the surrounding bush tracking down the nesting boxes and checking the contents and other key data on the provided analysis sheets. We spent from 9.30 am to 4.30 pm (with a 20 minute break for a sandwich) checking our eighteen boxes and got fairly wet on occasions but there were one or more (once 4) gliders of both types in more than half the boxes but no phascogales. We only had one difficult moment when our rental car failed to make it up a not too steep incline crossing a rain soaked paddock and begian to slip sideways - however we gently reversed down the slope and walked to the next nesting box. We had a really great day chatting with the truly nice, as well as deeply knowledgeable, Ray Thomas and his niece and her husband and their four year old daughter and it was great to be back in the bush again and doing something useful - though my legs were certainly stiff at the end of the day from the ladder climbing and bush walking up and down the various gullies and creeks. One sad aspect of the day was to see, first hand and at close range, what dreadful things have been done to the Australian bush by inept and ignorant farming and 'wood harvesting' over the last 200 years by Europeans and for the last n,000 previous years by the "original inhabitants" 'firestick farming' so beloved of some very misguided people. What was once densely wooded, with multiple varieties of large, medium, small trees and hugely diverse shrubs and plants is now a wasteland of scrubby eucalypts that are so densely overgrown none of them survive beyond 10 or 12 years. Of course, ignoring the effects of the 1952 bush fires, the major culprit is/was the 'logging industry' whose 5 major mills instigated the clear felling of every single tree over a huge area followed by farming practices that were ignorant of contour protection although the various divisions of the department of agriculture and pasture protection boards have made dozens of attempts since Federation to educate land users in effective methods of regenerating the soil. This is a situation pretty much repeated throughout this continent by greedy and ignorant people. At the end of day Ray guided us back to town and we said goodbye to another great Australian. He started the project 14 years ago and has given his time since then to planting many hundreds of thousands of a mixture of Ironbarks and another 40 different trees and shrubs to, eventually provide habitat to allow the Regent Honey Eater to arrest its decline and, hopefully, move away from the critically endangered zone. While waiting the 20 or so years it will take for the habitat to grow to a maturity that will allow that to happen it has become dense enough for 142 species of rare and seldom previously seen birds to return to the area. Ray also fills in the 'off season' by making and placing the nesting boxes (we inspected) to assist the endangered squirrel glider both survive and move its isolated population towards the other populations in the Great Dividing Range where there is different genetic material so that the species can become stronger. The boxes are also used by squirrel gliders and, a major bonus, by the occasional brush tailed phascogale that hasn't been seen (alive) in the area for decades. If only there were more Australians like Ray Thomas and the volunteers who help make this, one day, a reality. PS: We used our notebook with HSPA throughout the trip and obtained excellent speeds in Benalla and Seymour with over 3 mbps in both places. On the Hiume Freeway we got over 4 mbps. Saturday, April 25. 2009Days Come And Go...................John Linton ......business continues to get a little bit stronger as the days of this 'recession' continue to tick by. As many financial writers continue to say - "we have yet to experience any real effects" (and unless you work for Pacific Brands or BHP that's probably true for the overwhelming majority of Australians) and the $A20+ billion of Krudd handouts may have ameliorated some of the more urgent blocked credit cards for a number of people who have been forced/chosen to live 'hand to mouth'. I had to laugh at this particular stupidity by Krudd when I opened the mail last Thursday and there, lo and behold, was a Commonwealth cheque for $900.00! What is that man thinking of.....and why didn't I get the last one! Talk about an ill considered, total waste of money. (I'm not a hypocrite so I'll either tear it up or donate it to something that needs the money more than I do). Back to real business - the other issue that we have been tracking since late 2008 is the customers who default on their credit card/direct debit payments. Interestingly while these have risen slightly on the major bill run on the first working day of each month the number of people who fail to clear that debt by the end of the month has remained virtually static (perhaps that's partly due to the Krudd hand outs?). We have had one business customer who had 8 SHDSL connections go broke which was an expensive mistake on our part (who would have thought that pubs can't make money in tough times?). So we currently see little affect on our particular customer base but then, as everyone keeps saying, "it's early days". So, assuming it is early days and that things are going to get worse in the future (Whine will need a strong reason to not only 'delay' the promised tax cuts but actually increase taxes on the "rich" - and I hope all you wealthy Lane Cove voters who decided a 'TV personality' was a more suitable candidate than a long serving MP choke on your muesli when that little 'surprise' puts another dent in your ability to pay your private school fees - you stupid, stupid idiots) we have a few months to further "batten down the hatches" or whatever term is appropriate for harsher financial times. We fortunately increased our prices last December 1st for new customers and added the $3.00 surcharge for 'old customers' which has meant that we will not have to increase plan prices over the coming months (and for those that remember we have actually added a significant number of 'value adds' over the past four months). The reductions in IP bandwidth charges will kick in in July and then again in August together with a range of other supplier price reductions over the next three months which will further 'shore up the defences'. Our premises move, while requiring capital injection will also reduce our operating costs and keep them reduced in terms of making us more efficient as well as paying less rent for more space (which we need to grow our 'sales force'. So we have pretty much done everything we can possibly do to ensure we are as protected as we can make ourselves 'recession proof' at least by taking actions over areas of expenditure and income that we can control. Also, as the lowest cost provider of the services we offer we believe that provides 'innate' protection when money for all sorts of people and organisations becomes 'tight' What is actually going to happen? Probably only 'The Shadow' knows and I don't have his cell number. PS: I have to share with you P J O'Rourkes summary of the two party political party process he used in his address to the CIS last Wednesday: " The Left is the party of government activism – the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, slimmer, taller, and take a dozen strokes off your golf game. The Right is the party that says government doesn't work. And then they get elected and prove it." Friday, April 24. 2009You Know What Your Trouble Is Don't You......John Linton ....you're much too aware of far too much detail about your customer's problems. ....said to me yesterday....believe it or not.......by a senior executive of a major supplier to Exetel. It had never occurred to me before as we built Exetel over the past five years on the basis of providing second by second information systems that, in my opinion, are the basis for being able to manage any commercial endeavour and used as many of today's modern 'business tools' and processes to complement that information system that "too much information" could be a very bad thing. That 'snap your head back' comment was made in response to a, I admit, fairly tersely worded email I had sent and a subsequent telephone conversation addressing my communication. It was made by someone I have known virtually all of my business life and whom has never had any problems with speaking 'frankly' (and truthfully) on any subject - perhaps why we have remained in contact for such a long time. After we concluded the conversation I thought about what "being aware of too much detail" meant and I can see how it can be a problem in a business - I had just never noticed it as Exetel has 'drifted' into placing itself in that position. My complaint that elicited that response, and I can't be specific, was that it very much appeared to me that the supplier was not taking enough care in its provisioning policies and, it appeared to me, was obviously not provisioning various services across different parts of Australia to levels that were appropriate. I cited a list of incidents across several different areas as observational support for this contention and concluded by saying that he must be aware of this situation (via his own reporting systems) and if his own reporting systems were so inadequate then he must have had similar complaints from other wholesale customers....to which his answer (which I believed) was that until I had raised the issues he had no knowledge of any problems of the type to which I was referring at all and certainly no-one outside or inside his organisation had raised any such 'problem'. I believed him when he said that he wasn't aware of any such problem and that no other wholesale customer had made raised the issues with his company. His comment was that no senior executives of any of his wholesale customers ever raised operational issues at such a 'trivial level' and he was pretty sure they had no interest within their own company of dealing with such matters. Fair enough - it was his closing comment that caused me to question what I have been doing for a fair while now. That comment was - "why was I concerning myself [at my "level"] with what were obviously transient operational issues that either were already being addressed or would be addressed over time and were an ongoing, never to be resolved at any particular moment in time, part of provisioning an ever growing network with constant fluctuations in demand". ...and of course he was quite right. If we had never put our forum in place (and then closely monitored it) or if we had never put in place the ticket/fault resolution statistic trends I, personally, would never have become aware of the current issues or all of the other (and yes many, if not all, were transient - depending on your definition of transient) issues that have been the cause of so much 'friction' with our suppliers over the years and even within our own small company - we certainly wouldn't have spent so much time communicating with our customers about them. In simplistic terms it's very easy to decry this view (that all problems will get solved as quickly as circumstances and resources permit by the people responsible without any interference from "higher management") with the management school idealism of "a customer's problem is everyone's problem" but, anyone who has been in a commercial enterprise for more than ten seconds understands the limits of the validity of that view. The real issue is that in a business such as one supplying network services to residential users there is a very good case to be made for no 'senior executive' involvement in operational issues and any 'large' company would certainly not have this problem. Small/tiny companies like Exetel will have this problem because 'senior management' is the same as 'operational management' in many if not all parts of our operation so we can't have the 'luxury' of (highly competent and therefore very expensive) management 'layers' to divorce the owners/'senior management' of the company (who also work long hours in many of the operational aspects of the company) from almost every detailed problem that occurs within the company. It is a problem - the problem being that owners of small companies such as Exetel do react to customer problems (real and imagined) too directly and do spend too much time on doing that. I'm sure there's a solution if only that we grow too tired to keep doing it and take the 'punishment' that will involve. Perhaps now is the right time to do that? Thursday, April 23. 2009I Don't Know Where We Are, Toto....John Linton ....but it sure don't look like the telecommunications industry in 2004 any more.(apologies to L Frank Baum) It's been a difficult week or so for Exetel in many ways. Finalising contracts for the coming twelve months, doing the detailed planning for the premises move and making adjustments to many of our services and plan structures being the obvious contributions to adding time burdens to already very heavily over loaded time schedules for more than a few of Exetel's limited personnel resources. When we first started Exetel we had no clear notions as to what we intended to do other than to re-define, as far as that was ever going to be possible for a tiny start up company, just how good a communications service could be provided at how low an end user cost. We had no idea of time frame for doing that beyond "two or so years" and no thoughts as to the number of customers we would need to provide services to in order to achieve the volume buying discounts that would be needed by our suppliers beyond we thought it would be "greater than 50,000" (remembering that in late 2003 no ISP had 50,000 ADSL customers except Telstra and, possibly, Optus). So....its now over five years (rather than "two or so") and its close to 100,000 customers (which is definitely "greater than 50,000") and all that I can see that has been achieved is that I've got a lot older (than the elapsed years) and that there is more to do each day than there was five years ago - with a lot larger risks involved. Oh....the other thing that has happened is that the telecommunications industry has changed beyond all recognition. It was driven home to me yesterday when, as part of the planning for the premises move, we formally scrapped the idea of installing any form of 'conventional' telephone lines in the new office nor in fact installing any form of 'conventional' PABX (even a VoIP PABX). We currently have 50 ISDN lines connecting our Sydney and Colombo offices via our Mitel PABX installed in the North Sydney office but we plan to now install an Asterisk PABX in one of our Sydney data centres and terminate all customer/prospective customer incoming calls via 1300 numbers. When we started Exetel we had a 'virtual' office for handling incoming calls and when we rented our first commercial office space some four months later we had 6 ISDN lines and a $A2,500 telephone console. Now, a little over 5 years later we will have an 'infinite' number of inbound/outbound lines (via VoIP) and we will have a more sophisticated 'PABX' than anything we could buy commercially for less than many hundreds of thousand of dollars that we have developed ourselves in software with a couple of redundant servers and some specialised hardware....and we thought nothing of having a 250mbps/250mbps link between the office and our data centre with another 10gbps/10gbps dark fibre link as a back up - both cheaper than our original two 2mbps/2mbps links in April 2004. We have come a very, very long way in terms of our programming, networking and system skills in a relatively very short time - that's the good part. The bad part is that I would never have dreamed that we would take such a risk and think so little of it - and I'm not exactly a risk averse individual. This risk is on top of the risk we have taken in putting $1.7 million of our own cash into buying commercial property in a downward moving property market so that Exetel can get a lower office cost and have its own small data centre - another thing that five years ago I would have regarded as being the very last and totally undesirable thing to do. While I never thought that I would get much of a return from putting so much time and money into Exetel I certainly had zero plans to be still investing major (for us) amounts of money in it five years later! However - it is the concept of not only having no 'standard' telephone lines and using a 'home grown' remote "PABX" that provides services to one office in North Sydney and another one in Colombo as well as several individuals scattered around Australia that underlines how much telecommunications has changed, even in Australia, over the past five years. Think about the implications to the 'supply side' of telecommunications services in Australia: 1) No 'business' telephone line rental for a telephone carrier 2) No business telephone call charges for a telephone service provider 3) No PABX hardware purchase cost for an equipment manufacturer 4) No high interest charges for a finance company on PABX leasing 5) No gouging annual maintenance charges from a 'telephone hardware service specialist' 6) No fax lines/fax charges .....and for Exetel a massive cost saving every month....... (the rewarding upside to such 'bravery') I wonder what would happen if every tiny/small/small medium/medium sized business did what Exetel plans to do....both in terms of their 'bottom line' and the telephone communications 'landscape' in Australia. Wednesday, April 22. 2009Pensioner Discounts?John Linton Has Whine Managed To Get "The Inflation Genie Back In The Bottle" yet? I suppose there have been less competent federal treasurers than Whine Swan (though it's hard to imagine there has ever been a less educationally and experientially qualified one) but his ridiculously stupid and profoundly wrong "inflation genie" statement in his first budget will define how totally inadequate he is to hold any job in finance at all - let alone his current position. I was reminded of how totally stupid Whine actually is when I read this earlier this morning: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6138997.ece which underlines just how far the major world's economies are, and were, from needing to "get the inflation genie back in the bottle" less than twelve months ago and how hopelessly inept and totally out of their depth the Labor party is to 'manage the economy'. My comments yesterday were very much along the same lines as I pointed out that virtually every 'component' of providing end user communications services in Australia had fallen over the past twelve months (except for pricing from Telstra Wholesale) and that it is a common trend in hard financial times for this to happen. The coming budget will have to deal with the Whitlamesque/Weimar Republicesque/Krudd borrowing splurges that shower hundred dollar notes to anyone who can spend them and by now treasury would have told him (assuming they didn't in the first place) that not only did his childish grandstanding splurges not create a single job but that the majority of the money disappeared overseas (and I'm not counting the money he actually sent directly overseas to all those Kiwis and Brits etc who received it courtesy of once having a backpacking holiday here 30 years ago). Apart from the fact that Krudd has as much understanding of economics as Whitlam did (and has produced the same result as Whitlam in half the time) he has already run out of money to spend and will now begin to have to deal with his grotesque addiction to his personal cargo cult attitude to federal financing. For those people with even less knowledge of economics and finance than me (if there are such people - other than Krudd and Whine) let me give you the benefit of my experience of recessions (ones that we didn't have to have). Firstly there's the denial (we've passed that phase as of Monday after 7 months of continual ridiculously bare faced lying by Krudd and Whine), then the denial is immediately replaced, as if someone turned a switch, with the wild exaggerations of how bad everything is going to be (we are now in that phase) then there's the reality that for 1 - 3 years everything gets very tough for all the people who have the least abilities (financial mainly but societally too) to deal with the problems. In simple terms this means that having pissed all of the country's readily available resources away in mindless and totally useless 'panem et circenses' handouts to try and ensure re-election the (Labor) government of the day will borrow money at very high interest rates to pay for essential services needed to actually 'run the country'. There won't be enough money to do this so they will cut the services and raise taxes. Anyone want to bet against that?...anyone?....anyone? Exetel, a tiny, vaguely commercial enterprise (whose directors and owners would commit suicide before they would vote for people like Krudd and Whine and the screech owl) can obviously do nothing to assist the mess created by the muppets currently posing as a Federal Government.....though I suppose we could send Whine a toothbrush, some tooth whitener and the name of a good orthodontist as his parents obviously had no regard for dentistry during his childhood phases and perhaps some Ashley and Martin vouchers for Krudd - even some further elocution lessons for the screech owl to attempt to find those missing syllables and reduce her upper register shrieking delivery down to a more comprehensible level? On second thoughts that might help those three individuals (who are already full time helping themselves) but it wouldn't do much for the people who really need some consideration. What we, possibly, could do as our totally irrelevantly tiny contribution to the likely difficult times ahead is to, as several of our customers have suggested lately, offer some broadband plans for 'pensioners'. Now, its clearly my fault but I'm not sure I know what people define as 'pensioner' these days. I know the 'old definition' was people who had reached retirement age and received a government pension in gratitude for their contributions to the country's economy by working the whole of their lives to make it possible for wastes of space like Krudd to throw all their tax money away so he can go on living overseas making a goose of himself. But a cursory 'straw poll' seems to indicate that you can receive a 'pension' at the age of 14 now (unmarried mother support) and the scope widens from there. Nonetheless - and without knowing how we might 'qualify' the offer, it seems that Exetel should make its contribution to assisting those people less able to assist themselves by providing broadband plans at our cost rather than try and make even the minimal profit we currently attempt. I would have thought our "PAYU" plans pretty much fitted that category but apparently not. So by the end of this coming weekend we will put in place some cost price plans for pensioners. We will try our best to make them truly affordable but Telstra's ADSL1 wholesale pricing makes that extremely difficult and ADSL2 is not available in almost all regional and rural areas so it's a challenge. Any ideas will be very welcome. (I got up even earlier than usual this morning to watch the Liverpool v Arsenal game - great game - strange result - I wonder if anyone has ever scored four goals in a game their team didn't win? Oh well.) Tuesday, April 21. 2009Bad Financial Times = Lower Costs For EveryoneJohn Linton It appears that Australia is going to experience very bad financial times 'real soon now'......according to the various people who are most widely reported in the media, including even some of the more responsible Australian financial media, though I note there are no citations of the same people's previous flip flop pronouncement's that Australia will only be marginally affected by the 'GFC' and that their skillful, timely and forceful interventions have prevented recession in Australia: http://business.smh.com.au/business/one-in-four-firms-to-cut-staff-20090420-acp8.html So what actually is going to happen in Australia? Actually the only real interest I have in the future state of the Australian economy (other than to feel very sorry for those people who may be severely negatively affected by any significant down turn) is how it will affect Exetel's abilities to discharge its obligations to its customers, employees and suppliers. So far I've seen no negative affects from the widely touted 'slowing of the economy' in those terms and, given that Exetel may well not have bought as well from its suppliers in the past as it should have (almost certainly due to my very poor negotiation abilities), all I have seen, and am seeing, is a slight beneficial increase in our 'survivability' by achieving slightly lower buy prices for virtually all of the base 'components' of our service offerings. Neither I, nor anyone else at Exetel, claims any credit for those small positive achievements. They are the obvious and historically proven consequence of every 'economic down turn' in financial history - prices of almost everything fall....and of course they fall by larger amounts for our larger competitors so we actually gain no direct competitive advantage from these predictable scenarios. However we do gain the slight financial benefits of either a slightly increased profit margin (which because our profit margins are so low is actually quite significant) and by passing on the majority of the savings we have made to our end users we do very slightly increase our competitiveness in some marketplaces as our competitors seem to rarely pass on any cost price reductions they obviously achieve over time...different rationales for being in business....nothing untoward. In fact in other parts of the world you see this sort of thing happening: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/20isp.html?_r=2 I do wonder sometimes why Exetel hasn't been able to reduce its end user pricing more than we have done over the past five years given the continual decrease in the prices of many of the 'components of our services over that time. I'm excluding the ADSL1 services provided by using Telstra Wholesale infrastructures that (for Exetel) have moved either not at all (in the case of service activation and exchange to Exetel back haul costs or only very slightly in terms of month port rental costs). However it is true that the cost of providing an ADSL1 service has fallen in terms of pure IP costs which have fallen (for Exetel) 66% in five years and the addition of caching IP which we introduced some two years ago which reduced the cost of that portion of the traffic by over 80%. ADSL2 service components have reduced more dramatically over the past three years falling by over 40% for the ADSL2 specific costs and benefiting from the same pure and cached IP component cost reductions noted above. I suppose this is because, while these very significant cost reductions don't appear to be directly translated in to the same scale of price reductions to end users, they have in fact been applied but perhaps because the cost reductions have been applied over time it doesn't 'jump out at you'. Then again many people simply dismiss service enhancements (usually provided with no increase in the plan cost) as being "of no benefit to me" and therefore dismiss them as benefits/cost savings although for the people who use them they clearly are very much a cost saving. A reasonable enough view for any particular person to hold. Exetel has now ended its annual contract negotiation season for the majority of the service components it buys and, generally speaking, we have achieved cost reductions on every component and service and product we buy - some larger than others but overall larger than we achieved some 12 months ago....a pretty clear sign of tougher times for the providers of these services and products consistent with 'economic times' being tougher now than they were 12 months ago. My only concern is that as times continue to get tougher over the coming months (assuming that does become the case) then our competitors will benefit from the even lower prices that may well prevail later in this calendar year. I realise that's very much a 'sour grapes' attitude and I don't mean it in that way - I meant it simply as a recognition that the best pricing for many items will be July - November 2009. We could have bought at lower costs in several instances if we had been 'braver' or more adventurous. However we are an innately conservative company in some surprising aspects of business and we chose not to 'buy on price' in more instances than I think we would have in past years. While I have absolutely no knowledge of Australian or global economics and financial scenarios I, personally, think that there will be some quite serious risks in operating a small business in Australia over the coming 12 months. Personally, I wanted to avoid as many of those as we could foresee....even though it meant paying more than perhaps we should have in several instances. Laugh for the day: Monday, April 20. 2009NBN2 - Already Unnecesary From What I SeeJohn Linton I finished working on the remaining 'loose ends' of our changes to various aspects of our 'product line ups' yesterday morning and we will now make decisions on what we do to improve our mobile, VoIP and wireless data services for 'release' by May 1st (having comprehensively missed the April 1st dead line). It has taken a lot longer than I thought it would partly because of the constant changes in those market areas and partly because of our inability to obtain improvements in our 'component' costs from our suppliers or prospective new suppliers. We have one further meeting with a possible new provider today which is a long shot in terms of any advantages to what we currently have a need for but may prove more useful in the future if they do decide to do 'real things' in Australia having made some half hearted attempts in the past but never achieving very much. With the current carriers focus on how they can get money from the government during the new 'investigation phase' of Krudd's latest fantasy "No Broadband Now" election promise breaking distraction maybe there is a chance for a new carrier to make some 'waves' in the Australian market and stir up the increasingly stolid status quo - not much of a chance but some chance perhaps. I had hoped to be able to reduce our current mobile offerings by around 30% for business users and 15% to 20% for residential users and may still be able to do that but not with the required level of 'comfort' that we would have liked to have seen and be able to have a 'safety net' for. However I guess we'll just have to factor in more 'risk' than we would normally do to be able to meet the price points and content required by the majority of today's users. Similarly, apart from the modem prices, we haven't been able to do much in terms of reducing the costs of HSPA services though, again, we should be able to improve their wider appeal from May onwards by taking more risk ourselves. We had planned to do some, for us, significant amount of promotion this month but we encountered some unexpected concerns over the past week and I put that on hold pending their resolution. However we now need to proceed more 'forcefully'. The lack of the 'magic box' remains a barrier but we inch ever closer to finding the exact product that is needed to make this more widely appealing. So we will make some changes to the HSPA plans by COB on Friday of this week and then change the mobile and VoIP plans by COB on Friday next week with lower end user prices on all of those services - not of the magnitude we had hoped for but significant nonetheless. Like every other provider, I assume, I continue to be impressed with the rate of VoIP take up and the increasing use by both residential and business customers who make the move away from their PSTN/ISDN land lines. Exetel has run all of its business via VoIP for over two years now and I have done the same at home and for the past six months or so on my mobile. I can't tell the difference in quality between a VoIP call and a 'standard' call and I very much doubt that anyone else can - on either my mobile or the office phones in Sydney and Sri Lanka and my home phone. I suppose the only surprising thing now is that any sensible person uses the 'standard' telephone services at all these days. I find myself using HSPA more and more even at home and although it seldom operates at much above 1 mbps I really can't notice any difference between my home ADSL2 and the 40 mbps connection at the Exetel North Sydney office. While I understand that my usage (no major downloading) is not 'typical' of many broad band users it is certainly typical of the heavy business user and someone who recreationally uses internet in every aspect of their personal life (except for stealing other people's property). I no longer use the internet connections supplied by hotels, both because of the price and the speeds, and have more and more often begun to use my note book when way from the office or home and have even started to carry a note book as a 'standard' item in my brief case. I notice more and more people using their notebook/laptop in coffee shops and pubs as well as on buses and trains. It seems to me that there has been a change in internet use over the past three or so years towards mobility and the cost savings of VoIP and I also notice that in our monthly revenue streams with those services gradually becoming a larger proportion of our revenues each month. Our volumes are insignificant in a 'whole of market, context and our focus is more concentrated than the large companies so I'm not reading anything into that other than for many people an NBN2 (in the unlikely event it ever happens) will not very important for the majority of current or future broadband users. There appears to be an increasing similarity between the ways mobile telephony has replaced wire line telephony and the way that mobile data is beginning to become more important - even at this early stage of its development. However Krudd seems to have fooled the stupider members of the Australian electorate with his latest insanely stupid lies just as he did with his original insanely stupid lie (does anyone remember how he promised a 98% national broadband coverage for $A4.7 billion dollars with the first areas switched on by October 2008???? and if they do, and have seen Krudd now say it would never have worked WHY ON EARTH do they go along with his latest lie????? - oh I forgot - they're stupid). If there is anyone who hasn't become aware of this remarkable story it should lift your spirits: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article6122594.ece Sunday, April 19. 2009
We Need To Become A 'Major' Hardware ... Posted by John Linton
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Comments (15) Trackbacks (0) We Need To Become A 'Major' Hardware Re-SellerJohn Linton We have never paid much attention to hardware sales and have basically the only hardware we have offered has been Netcomm modems since we sold our first ADSL connection in February 2004. We have also had to supply quantities of Unwired wireless modems and, more recently, HSPA modems in growing quantities. Over that time our customers and agents have bought over 60,000 modems and well over another 80,000 other devices - the customer purchases being overwhelmingly as part of of an ADSL service purchase. This has been because we have never had any buying power to obtain 'super good' prices for hardware and we never saw ourselves as making any money out of the provision of hardware which we usually passed on at our cost plus a small handling fee. And so for all that time we have simply acted as a conduit for those customers of ours (we never made the pricing available to non-Exetel users) who wanted to acquire a modem or peripheral with their ADSL service. We only sold Netcomm products because we could get a competitive (if not wonderful price) and by not adding anything but a token mark up it provided agood low cost option for those who wanted it. Our relationship with Netcomm remained solid throughout that time and the simplicity of the order/delivery/payment processes we developed and then maintained made it as a hassle free service for everyone concerned. We now find ourselves if not exactly needing to widen this small part of our operations we do need to generate larger sales volumes of the new products we are looking at supplying for HSPA and other services to be able to buy direct from the various factories to be able to get the customer price points we need to reach. For instance, to make HSPA more viable in regional/rural areas we need to make quantity commitments for Yagi aerials to the factory we gave the specs to and while we could carry the cost of ordering multiple thousands we would prefer not to to do that so if we could develop an on line 'shop/store' then hopefully we could generate more sales more quickly. Similarly we have opportunities to buy the Huawei 'sticks' from the massive over stock situations in the EU where the financial downturn has combined with the change to faster network speeds than 7.2 mbps to leave more than one major provider with tens of thousands of pretty much unsaleable units - the only trouble is that these people want money before shipping and they want order quantities of 5k plus and preferably 10k - far too big an investment for us unless we can find a way of selling to non-Exetel customers. The same situation applies to the 'magic' box we have been looking for over the past 18 months - we will need to order in multiple thousands to get the price we need and we have no way of selling those sorts of numbers to our own customers. Moving forward there will be more rather than less of these situations and we need to put in place the on line processes and, much more importantly, the fulfilment processes required to handle thousands of monthly transactions - we obviously can't do it ourselves. No-one in our small company has any 'retail/fulfilment' knoledge whasoever so it's a daunting prospect in many ways but we need to make some attempt at doing it and we ned to do that much sooner rather than later. Like every part of our business it seems that each month brings something new to be put in place and therefore, even in smallish ways, makes the overall business more complicated to operate and to manage. Right now I don't see any alternative other than to learn some new skills very quickly. Whle that is going to be very difficult the need is obvious. Assuming we can handle the financing of the purchases (not by any means a 'given) we have the opportunity of reducing the cost of the varous hardware components associated with HSPA and VoIP by quite significant amounts. A prime example is that we currently pay around $A135 (plus GST) for a U169 while at a 5k price from an EU provider we could get 'distressed stock' for less than $A50.00 (plus GST). We may well have to do this anyway as it seems the U169 is being discoontinued and being replaced by a lower cost 3.6 mbps unit or a much higher cost 14.4 mbps unit - so we have a very real need in the not too distant future. Similarly the best 'local price' for a 'magic box' is close to $A400.00 while a 'manufactured to order' price from the PRC factory is well South of $A200.00. The same story with Yagi aerials, ATAs, VoIP handsets and even HSPA mobile handsets. Old dogs are going to have to learn new tricks. Saturday, April 18. 2009Will 'The World' Ever Be 'Right' Again?John Linton A stunnigly beautiful late Autumn morning in Sydney with a cloudless blue sky, sun with still a hint of warmth in it and an earlier than usual, but very gentle, sea breeze shimmering the water. All is right with the world - even the coffee tastes better than usual.....but then yesterday's 'events' start flooding back and the financial press doesn't help keep the mood going and after skim reading the overseas papers it seems that not all is right with the world after all...at least in terms of making some sort of sense of what the immediate future will/may/may not bring. As I know absolutely nothing about global or Australian politics or global or Australian economics and have less than a trivial level of knowledge of Australian business or community operating mechanics I think I'm well placed to comment on these issues. (after all knowing and sticking to proven facts and having a thorough understanding of any subject have long ceased to be any reuirement to express a view on any subject in this country).While obviously being totally bereft of any knowledge or facts about any of these issues I do have the overwhelming advantage of not having a personal aggrandisement agenda nor a requirement to keep a tiny fraction of the Australian population with their snouts in the trough and therefore any statement I make is purely what my inadequate mind and narrow experiences since living in Australia as a 'sole' immigrant' since December 1962 have brought my way. 1) There is what old age brings to each person - no, not a greater ability to laugh at the brazen lying of political fools and charlatans - the reverse. So it's inevitable that my views of all politicians, of whatever shade of red or blue they may currently be espousing, has reached the level of total contempt for their lack of ethics, education, intellectual and experiential abilities to even begin to attempt to carry out the responsibilities assigned to them in anything other than outstandingly easy times. While I may well not live much longer in this outstandingly wonderful country I am certain of one thing - that Krudd and co will continue to destroy its fabric faster than any inept bunch of fools ever given the privilege of making decisions on behalf of Australia's inhabitants has ever done in the past. 2) I regret seeing the passing of the great Australian characteristic of 'mate ship' or, if you find that word trashed by political misuse beyond redemption, easy going acceptance of almost everybody and everything with equanimity. It has been replaced via various totally misguided 'political' influences with some thing called "multiculturalism" which has replaced easy going acceptance with schisms of hatred based on weird religions and stupid cultural craziness and "long term ethnic antagonism". The 'Australianism' of the 1960s that I came to was inclusive and contained a mild expectancy that migrants (like me) would modify our views and beliefs, to over time, bring them in line with the common culture of Australia - not the other way round. I abhor what I now see, read and hear and I can assure anyone who cares to listen that it is not an 'improvement' in any way shape or form. 3) I bitterly regret that decades of mindless and unqualified economic tinkering, liberally sprinkled with "recessions we had to have", forced unionisation, forced government asset stripping and crazy financial de-regulation applied by people as crazy as Connor/Whitlam, Hawke/Keating and Howard/Costello has wrought havoc across every aspect of Australia creating the twin abominations of half the country crippled by the multigenerational welfare "supports me forever" syndrome and the other half believing "it's my right to become immensely wealthy without ever creating anything of value for anyone else in doing so". 4) I even more bitterly regret seeing what has happened to this great country that, then, had the foresight and common good view and common will of being in the final stages of completing the Snowy Mountains Scheme and the (less successful) Ord River Scheme to seeing the succeeding 40 years pass without one more cent spent on what those two major schemes addressed - Australia's chronicly worsening water supply problems - and seeing the terrible, negative results on country NSW and Victoria that looked so different when I first went there to the wasteland I see today. I could go on but there is no point. Australia, via political misguidance on an epic scale, has become a meaner spirited, hopelessly divided and stupider country with an ever stupider population that ensures it becomes ever meaner spirited and even more divided between the time I first experienced the sheer wonderfulness of living in Australia in the working class/housing commission dominated suburb of Maroubra as a teenager to the sheer miserableness (in comprison) of living today in a State where the transport, hospitals, law and order, education systems just don't work and any chance of making them work in the future is being removed by immense borrowing to [fill in your own meaningless catch phrase] by the latest ever spiralling downward in competence federal government. So - will the world ever be right again? It will take a lot more that the apathy/me-me-me/multiculturalism divisiveness created by 40 years of gross mis-management of Australian's expectations of what they need to do and be to continue to enjoy what good luck, good fortune, and the work of real Australians created for them since 1788 that has been pissed away by the last two generations with the last rites being now conducted by the dumbest group of people ever to be inflicted on this poor country by itselves. The sole contributions of the vast majority of "Australians" of the last 40 years? - either - "why isn't my government handout larger?" - or - "how do I get even more for nothing?". Friday, April 17. 2009Did The 'Communications World' Change While I Wasn't Looking?John Linton It may well just be my inability to have grasped the essential realities of the Australian communications industry over the past ten or so years but it seems to me that everything that I thought I knew about is changing, or has already changed, and is now rapidly becoming beyond my ability to understand. Now that may sound pointlessly over stated, perhaps even 'dramatic', but it is what I currently think. It depends on your own personal perspectives as to how you personally deal with the things you come across in your daily life but I think that the overwhelming majority of rational human beings (or perhaps more correctly, human beings who believe themselves to be rational) use their past experiences and accumulated knowedge to deal with 'things' that crop up in their daily lives. My fairly mundane waking hours are largely devoted to dealing with the often difficult but almost always pretty insignificant details of operating a small buisness in Australia in a set of marketplaces that change continually, in minor ways, over time but overall remain fairly 'stable'. Similarly with suppliers and other providers to the marketplaces - nothing much changes 'day to day' and the constant gradual changes are discernible to anyone who spends a realistic amount of time ensuring that they put themselves in the way of obtaining and then understanding the information - pretty much me I would have thought until very recently.....but now I have my doubts. No, I'm not smoking anything virulent or even anything at all (haven't done for 20 or so years) and I don't need to up, or down, my meds - I haven't been to a doctor in decades and it's also far too early in the day for alcohol to have worked it's magic on my perceptions generally. We have a board meeting early this afternoon preceded by a 'director's briefing' by the various departmental managers within Exetel. These are standard, scheduled monthly events of no great import - just the required information interchanges that occur, in one way or another, in most realistically managed commercial operations around the world....and those events require a rested mind and a clear head. I will play my usual part in these meetings and do my best to make sensible suggestions and ask enough questions to ensure that I understand what is important for me to understand. However, while everything within Exetel's quite complex operations and developments appears to be pretty much 'as usual' the "outside worlds" that we interconnect with appear to be anything but 'normal'. I say this because I have reviewed the emails I received overnight and, apart from the sheer surprise that people who have hitherto regarded 5.30 pm as the beginning of an immutable 15 hour communications curfew actually wrote to me overnight, it was the content of what they wrote that made me get a strong cup of coffee and go outside to drink it to ensure there were no hallucingens leaking from the refrigerator or other kitchen appliances that were unbalancing my mind. In summary the supplier world seems to have changed at some previously undetected, but very recent, moment in the past to the point that hardware, software, several different services and two key services have all plunged in price. I quickly checked the $A exchange rates against the $US, the Euro and the Yen expecting to see some miracuous appreciation in its value since yesterday but there was no such thing - it had actually reduced a little. So it now seems that Exetel can buy ADSL2 DSLAMs for 'free for 24 months, HSPA modems at half the previous price which was itself one third of Optus' price, Yagi antennae at one third the previous price, software maintenance at one quarter the previous prices and various services at 40% or more less than we previously paid. Nice early Christmas presents/late Easter presents (and I did check it wasn't some sort of ground hog day version of April 1st). But what has caused this excessive generosity and since when has Exetel with its miniscule buying volumes become so many different suppliers of so many different products/services "new best friend" - literally - overnight? I have no idea....perhaps a whole lot of companies around the world that used to buy those products and services have been engulfed by the 'GFC' and fire sales on communications 'components' have begun? Perhaps there are so few buyers of communications 'components' left in Australia that Exetel is actually one of the few 'buyers' capable of paying its bills? Or....I still have absolutely no idea. Thank goodness it is the weekend tomorrow.....I can't begin to work out what should be done in this Alice In Wonderland communications world.......... Thursday, April 16. 2009
Instant Customer Feed Back - How Did ... Posted by John Linton
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Comments (19) Trackbacks (0) Instant Customer Feed Back - How Did We Exist Before Fora?John Linton We sent an email to our ADSL users yesterday afternoon following a suggestion from a customer (via the suggestion box) that we move the 'off peak' period start from 12 midnight to 2 am but still provide a full 12 hours a day, every day, of "off peak" time. It seemed to be a sensible suggestion and there have been times in the past when 'off peak' has started at 1.00 am and also for a brief period at 2.00 am....there appeared to be no reason not to contemplate changing it again. We have been refining the concept of 'off peak' usage since March 1st 2004 and after starting with unlimited usage during off peak time (which was 8 hours a day then) had to put some limit on it which we brought in late in 2004 at, if failing memory hasn't completely mislead me, a soft limit of 20 gb - still quite a hefty allowance in those days. We experimented with various forms of 'restraining' downloads over the next 12 months or so before bringing in charging for downloads over what had then reached 42 gb in a 9 hour period. We have progressively increased the 'allowance' in off peak as well as progressively increasing the amount of of peak time to what it is today - a full half day and 60 gb for all currently offered plans to new users - easily the most generous (and therefore easily the most useful) major plan component provided by any Australian ISP. Of course, not every user needs such a generous allowance but EVERY user benefits from having a twelve hour period each day where there internet use doesn't rack up down loads which allows them to select a lower 'peak time' plan allowance than they could do from other ISPs therefore allowing them to spend less money each month - the real advantage of this method of 'plan design'. Exetel have been able to continually increase the amount of allowance in off peak in line with our month on month growth of total IP bandwidth which has now reached well over 3 gbps which still means that 'off peak' usage goes nowhere near being even 50% used for most of the 12 hour period - though, presumably because so many customers don't understand how to use download schedulers, it still peaks at midnight each night before quickly falling away 20 minutes later. So there was more response to the email asking for feedback than any other email we have ever sent to the user base other than an email some two years ago requesting feedback on changes to fault resolution procedures. A lot of it was via email but there has also been a great deal via the forum thread opened for the purpose. As usual the 'spread' of suggestions is quite wide and, as always, is very useful. It has surprised me that so many people seem to be unaware of download managers and the other 'timing features' of the computer hardware they use and somehow have formed the view that they have to be 'awake' to start some download process but then I guess that's simply the 'VCR timer' issue still being a major factor in the use of 'technology' products. One of the suggestions, which strangely we have never considered before, is to allow the user to choose their 'off peak' period start time. This has some merit and although it could only be within a 'narrow choice band' it could well be another "Exetel Exclusive" that is useful to some percentage of customers as well as to Exetel. I'm sure our programming skills and resources could cope with providing a User Facilities choice of, say, a default 12 midnight to 12 noon 'off peak peiod' with the ability to select a 1 am to 1 pm period or a 2 am to 2 pm period. Perhaps we could 'reward' people who selected the later start periods with additional download allowances (66 gb for a 1 am start and 69 gb for a 2 am start?) I don't know - only having read the majority of the feedback just before I started writing this blog but maybe it would be both a benefit and another major 'plus' for Exetel's plans. I have always liked the ability to use the 12 midnight to 12 noon period on the pricing break down - to me, it looks more impressive than 2 am to 2 pm (though maybe it would get rid of the constant dribble of criticism that its hard to work out). One thing's for sure - customer feedback is a very valuable 'resource' in running a commercial enterprise better. |
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