John Linton It's nice to be back in Colombo for a few days even though the time allowed for each trip always seems too short to be comfortable for the various things that need to be done. However we got through almost everything that was planned for 'day one' and will be in better shape to address the 'day two issues' because of it. One of the issues we need to deal with is the business plan for the SL company for the new financial year and, more specifically the investments we will need to make in Sri Lanka over the coming twelve months. Of course our investments are trivial but, to us, they have to be carefully planned as the financial situations that may develop in Australia over the coming months remain of unknown impact(s) and we must remain cautious - though my every instinct is that this is one of those rare times not to be.
Looking at our trivial sized investments (in both Australia and Sri Lanka) was put in to perspective for me when I read this article on some of the problems confronting one of our two major suppliers in Australia:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124229337255318993.html
I, of course, have a very, very limited understanding of Optus Australia's investment programs and what little knowledge I may have over the years is almost always confined to discovering via Exetel customer dissatisfaction problems with 'underprovisioning' of various aspects of the Optus ADSL2 and now the HSPA networks. Having read the article I can better understand the difficulties that Optus/Singtel face and why the problems we continually come across are not likely to be addressed in the short term.
I reach this, personal and based on no knowledge other that what I am citing, conclusion because $US750 million dollars in cash (plus borrowing abilities of unknown but pretty large multiples of the free cash) are still not very large in terms of the investments needed in the communications infrastructures Optus is involved with in Australia that Singtel has to fund (and I have no idea what additional infrastructures that Singtel is involved with around the South East Asian region). It may well sound silly for someone like me who thinks Exetel's investment of $A2 million in buying and fitting out new premises is 'significant' to dismiss a few billion real dollars as being 'trivial' but in the context of the wireless infrastructure that Optus need in Australia - Singtel don't seem to have that much money available to support any significant Australian growth.
I am expressing a purely personal opinion based on practically no facts of course and I have already expressed a view that the notional, plucked out of thin air, $A43 billion stated by Krudd won't actually buy very much in the context of a FTTH network development which is the proper context for a theoretical $A1 billion Optus network investment. What this meant to me was that while Exetel are planning to grow an HSPA business in Australia based on the Optus network we may have missed a vital piece of information - which is does the network we are planning to use actually have the capacity to deliver even the modest demands the upper end of our estimates suggest would be needed?
This is an easier perspective to have when you are in a city where the 14.4 mbps speeds are certainly present but the capacity of the network I am logged into can't sustain them and drops out more often now, in fact much more often, than when I was here only three months ago. My personal use of the Optus HSPA network (for both data and VoIP) since September 2008 in Australia has been an unbroken success but I'm beginning to wonder whether this can be sustained as Optus add more users at a faster rate. It isn't something that I have seriously considered prior to my experience with the SLT service over the past 2 days (and remember I have been using it for over 15 months now - at intervals of three months - and have seen it grow from 3.6 mbps through 7.2 mbps and now to 14.4 mbps with no problems).
SLT may be a 'mine shaft canary' in indicating that HSPA is easier to roll out and attract customers than it is to continue to find the capital investment needed in network infrastructure upgrades when the service "takes off" by being accepted by an escalating number of users and that the capacity problems I am experiencing iin Colombo are related to an inability of the major provider to keep adding capacity in 'lock step' with the adding of more users.
All pure speculation but that is what happens when you 'leave home' - you get a different point of view.