Saturday, May 16. 2009Back To Sri LankaJohn Linton Annette and I will go to Sri Lanka later this morning to do the three month progress reviews and to finalise the planning for the new financial year for the Sri Lankan company. It remains an 'inconvenient' trip due to lack of suitable connecting flights from Singapore, KL, or Bangkok which means there is little option but to overnight at one of those cities and get a very early morning flight the next day. Alternateively you could look on the bright side and say it gives you the opportunity of a few hours in a different city to break the trip....which is easier to do the first few times but now it seems more like needing to travel for three days to do four days work. There is a plus about these long travel times, at least for me, in that it gives a chance to catch up on lost sleep as, for whatever reason, I fall asleep almost as soon as a plane takes off and as there is no internet on international flights at the moment I have nothing to distract me so flying to and from Sri Lanka I normally sleep the whole way. We have made considerable progress since we there 12 months ago signing the lease for the floor space and the fit out and finalising the Board Of Investment agreements and various other statutory obligations. We now have 20 full time employees and two interns and a Sri Lankan general manager and have moved Level 1 andLevel 2 support, provisioning of all services, residential sales and some pogramming functions to Colombo. It has also allowed us to offer 7 day a week support for residential users as well as extended support hours up to 10 pm at night. So many positive things have been accomplished. We have along way to go to bring the level of 'immediate' support knowledge up to the level it was in Australia prior to the move but that will be accomplished over time and is the principle goal for the coming year. How we accomplish that will be the subject of several days of detailed discussions next week along with the other reviews of individual personnel development and how we continue to expand the scope and size of the SL operations. It was a very 'brave' decison for a tiny company like Exetel and we did it differently to the recommendtions of several 'experts' we discussed the process with and certainly ignore the advice of Austrade in settling on Sri Lanka rather than India, the Philippines or even Singapore or Malaysia which they deemed far more suitable. They even suggested that Bulgaria would be a better choice. However we did our own 'research' and have not regretted selecting Sri Lanka in terms of a country or the people and we have managed to cope with effects of the civil war in the North of the country so far (touch wood) though even someone as blase as I am feels some sort of trepidation landing and taking off from Colombo's airport. We have got to put more effort in to many aspects of the work we do in Colombo and will, almost certainly, need to continue to send Australian 'advisors' to the Colombo office for at least the remainder of 2009 and probably well in to 2010 depending upon what we decide over the next few days. Having said that we will also need to make some decisions on what, if any 'outside work' the SL company can undertake over the coming months/year to provide more development opportunities for the current and future employees. I have had several casual enquiries aout providing services to other Australian companies (which, quite frankly, surprised me) and two more 'solid' enquiries from NZ companies, both small ISPs in that country. We are not ready to do that right now but we should be able, and have plans, to do that from around early 2010 if every thing works out well. It will be interesting to see how that develops later this year. I remain surprised at the fact that we still get the occasional 'complaint' from residential customers that we shouldn't 'export Aussie jobs" to a "pack of Indians who have terrible language skills". I find those comments surprising in two ways. Firstly that they are made at all in the 21st century when no Australian buys much Australian made goods or services with the possible exception of fresh food. Secondly, I am surprised at the 'language skill' comment because, as someone who has been part of much of the hiring process and remains very much a part of the personnel review process, the English language skills are at least as good as the engineers who used to provide engineering support in Australia and are certainly far superior to the 'English language skills' ( not to mention the education standard and good manners) of the people in Australia who complain about the language abilities of the SL personnel. I would think, over time, that those two minor issues will 'disappear' if only because xenophobic people will not select Exetel as their supplier and the people who complain about not being able to understand what is said to them by SL personnel will eventually improve their own English language skills which, judging from their ability to use English to write emails is well below what an Australian resident should aspire to....and yes, I understand, that they are seldom born in or even went to school in Australia....but. Friday, May 15. 2009
HSPA Modem Pricing - A True Curse In ... Posted by John Linton
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Comments (10) Trackbacks (0) HSPA Modem Pricing - A True Curse In Australia...John Linton ....but not in the majority of the rest of the world. I read this article earlier this morning: and apart from noting the trend of providing in-built HSPA modems in an ever widening array of notebooks and desktop computers was particularly irritated by this comment: "The Acer lacks the built-in cellular modem, but you can buy that from Verizon in plug-in form for $30" One of the MAJOR problems (at least for Exetel) is the cost to us of the HSPA modem 'stick' which from our carrier is around $A160.00 for the 7.2 mbps version and still over $A100.00 for the 3.6 mbps version - compared to this US pricing of less than $A40.00 to an END USER via a retail shop! It makes a very big difference in the 'attractiveness' of the HSPA service when, in Australia, the entry cost is so high. An ADSL modem costs less than $A30.00 (for a low end, but fully functional unit) and can be sold and delivered to an end user for $A40.00 without the service provider incurring a loss - and that is around the price point that we think it needs to be sold at - and that the reference to Verizon's US pricing seems to confirm. Of course an end user will be prepared to pay more for a 'magic box' (wireless router, including inbuilt HSPA and a couple of ATA ports for VoIP and 'standard telephones') but not for just connectivity. The widening of the range of new lap tops and even some desk tops with inbuilt HSPA modem SIM slots will address this issue over time but not for the majority of people who already have their computer set up at home. That scenario is at least two or three years away - particularly if financial circumstances in Australia become more difficult over the next 24 months. Of course, Exetel, like every other provider, 'has' to offer a zero cost modem price for a 24 month contract (a disincentive in itself) but that doesn't change the fact that we have to find a way of recovering the modem cost in the service pricing - and as far as I can see that just isn't possible right now so the HSPA service sold with a 'free' modem will never return a profit to the seller of Layer 2 services though I have little doubt that the 'subsidies' offered by the carriers on their retail pricing makes that possible for resellers of the services. The only solution for us, at least at the moment, is to go to the PRC and get HSPA modems direct from one of the manufacturers and make the volume commitments required to get a price that will allow us to sell the service at a price more widely accepted by end users and also stay in business. Currently we might be able to do that but even then our 'landed cost' is going to be around double what the US retail cost to end users is. Over time that may well change (and the recent rise in the $A has already helped from six months ago) but it is all 'relative' to the end user's expectation that all service providers must really want their personal business and offer everything for nothing. The user expectation of 'free' is so endemic now that it is difficult to actually offer 'true' pricing. So it remains a problem to be solved along with finding the rural/regional agents and the 'magic box'. The 'magic box' will, at least partially, solve the problem completely because it will have the HSPA modem function built in via a chip set but that product remains elusive at the price we want to pay though that has now become simply a matter of time rather than beating our heads against a brick wall convincing manufacturers that the spec we want is sensible to build. We are getting closer to the right price but it is taking much longer than I expected. Right now the cost of a 7.2mbps modem, sim, activation and shipping/insurance is three times the cost we estimate will allow the service to really 'take off'. This can be dealt with via the service supplier (us in this case) simply giving the modem away for free until we can deliver the 'magic box' but that can't be done by us for any volume as the cost is beyond our capacity to absorb and while our fundamental principle of being in business is to provide any service we offer at the lowest possible price to the end user that doesn't include us providing products at up front losses of $200.00 on services that make very little monthly profit. It, yet again, raises the question of why Australian carrier's retail marketing personnel only seem to be able to come up with the same 'go to market' strategy every single time there is a new product/service to be released - they always want to give it away smothered in the word "FREE!!!" multiple times on any print, radio or TV ad. It seems to indicate that Australian buyers are completely stupid and are so 'over marketed to' that if a product or service isn't "FREE!!!" they won't "buy" it. As no manufactured 'box' could ever me "free" what is it about consumer buyers that allows them to switch off what ever intelligence they might possess and 'accept' that commercial organisations are never going to provide anything for "FREE!!!"? However, on the positive side, the price that Verizon is charging via a retail store means that there are HSPA modems being manufactured, right now, at costs that we need to buy at over the coming months to make an HSPA service more widely acceptable by the sectors of the marketplace we wish to address. It seems to me that you have to work unreasonably hard to look at any sort of aspect of 'marketing' consumer communications services in Australia to find anything positive. So articles like the one cited make me feel pretty helpless which is a poor way of starting the day and also conveys negative feelings towards other issues to be dealt with. Perhaps the solution is to stop reading the overseas technical media? Thursday, May 14. 2009Other Opportunities For Exetel......John Linton .....if only we had more people and more time. One of the things that makes planning more difficult than it should be when trying to finalise a new operating plan for the coming financial year (apart from uncertainties in the general financial situation) is trying to put in proper perspective what other opportunities you should be considering other than the products and services you are already delivering and the processes and plans you are already part way through implementing. In Exetel's case we have as much 'opportunity' within our current operations as we have the management time and other personnel resources to deal with and that has been the case throughout our first five and a half years of operations to date. Having said that there is always the siren call of different coloured grass and the temptations of more exotic locations than the one you are in to provide at least glimpses of distractions. We managed to cope with the initial series of problems of setting up a 'back office' operation in Sri Lanka in the current financial year although that has a long way to go before it settles down in to meeting the requirements set for the different parts of it which are likely to take at least the remainder of calendar 2009. We have come a long way in making that series of objectives a reality so far but we face much more difficult challenges in the coming 12 months than we have met, and largely overcome, over the past 12 months so that will remain a 'project' that requires ongoing time and resources. Similarly, while we have made a much better than expected start to building a corporate sales force we have only reached the bottom of that long and steep ladder and have barely got one foot on the first rung - so a great deal of time (and money) has to be continually invested to make that a reality and a great deal of innovative thinking has to be made into new realities this type of operation has never done before - at least in my experience. Another significant project we have barely got started is the delivery of HSPA services in rural/regional areas of Australia. Not only do we have to massively grow our agent network (a major undertaking in itself) and find new ways that will be effective in promoting the services (something we have absolutely no knowledge of) but we have to learn to specify and get built hardware products in the PRC which is something we have zero knowledge of - and all of those things are on top of finding ways to compete with the usual suspects and their huge marketing budgets and love of "free" pricing structures. Then there are the demands of the general operations and meeting sales targets of a ten service company that competes with much bigger competitors in every area of its endeavours for another year which seems to take a great deal more time than it used to as the company continues to grow. We also have the issues with the constant growth of the Australian networks and the changes to the base infrastructures from 1 gbps to 10 gbps over the coming 6 - 12 months as well as all of the changes those few words encompass. So clearly we need something new and exciting to fill in the empty hours in our days and weeks in FY2009....which leads to the considerations of what else we should be doing to keep Exetel moving forwards and ensuring we can continue to provide career opportunities for our personnel and interests for our wilder spirits as well as ensuring the company remains financially viable in the longer term. Now that our friends at Deutsche Telecom are more seriously thinking of selling their T-Mobile interests in the UK to one or other of the larger operators there we have an increasing opportunity to 'partner' with some highly skilled and experienced people who will/may well find themselves at a loose end in the not too distant future. We have been talking with them for over a year about how to use some of Exetel's 'unique' abilities to offer wireless services in the UK and other parts of the EU and the current financial situation in the UK and the concomitant effects that has had on the UK wireless providers might mean that particular 'window of opportunity' is as widely open as it's ever going to get - at leeast for us. It's tempting because of the scale of business in the EU and the, current opportunities, of a very, very low 'entry cost'. Similarly there are the same/similar wireless, and more importantly VoIP, opportunities in Indonesia where the current 'state of play' in delivering wireless services to the, surprising large, 'English speaking' business and associated marketplaces offer opportunities to Exetel that are not available in Australia (by definition) and are either very poorly served at the moment or not served at all. The same scenario exists in other countries in the region where some particular skills that Exetel has could, in conjunction with local 'partners', produce a very, and mutually beneficial, result in relatively short time frames. While it may seem strange that a tiny company like Exetel has skills that are lacking in those countries 'native' companies or the plethora of 'multinationals' that operate there it is actually quite true. Such things can never be considered at any time other than the relatively short concentrated annual planning period when you re-check all your assumptions and look for errors in the figures you have constructed and they seldom survive that period because of time constraints and the ongoing demands of managing even a small growing business. However, Exetel is almost at the stage of being able to use its 'senior management' time for such things rather than having it all absorbed by second by second operational supervision, ofetn operative, activities and it is true that we have lost many opportunities over the past five years because we, literally, have had no time to consider them properly let alone allocating time to putting them in to operation. Perhaps next year..... Wednesday, May 13. 2009The Next Five Years Starts Real Soon NowJohn Linton It still surprises me how fast you can spend money when you move premises. It seems to me that no matter how careful I try to be in getting firm quotes for 'everything' all that really happens is that you get a constant stream of requests for all sorts of things that "weren't included" in the original quote and now seem to be urgently required as they weren't ordered when they were supposed to be - and I only have myself to blame as I took the responsibility for ensuring all the details were known before we started. Having said that the 'building work' for the new premises is proceeding very quickly and, if anything, appears to be ahead of schedule.....my brief look yesterday revealed the expected chaos of a building site/floor with 8 or 9 tradesmen doing various things to it but, if I wasn't mistaken, it was a more advanced sort of chaos than I had expected to see. Let's hope it turns out that way. I mention the building work because Exetel's CFO and I have been putting in place the changes to the Exetel FY2010 business plan in preparation for the next Exetel board meeting tomorrow and it seems that like the plans I put in place for the new premises we have had to add a lot of 'forgotten' items to the new plans for next financial year as we plan to change our business away from the 'model' of the past five years. Our major problem is that we have obtained no realistic estimate of what may or may not happen generally across Australia over the coming twelve months. We have been 'preparing ourselves' for an 'economic downturn' for over 8 months but have seen little or no impact on our small business to date with the exception of one of our business customers going into receivership (a chain of 11 hotels). We haven't seen any sign of the expected higher payment defaults from residential customers (perhaps courtesy of the Krudd welfare cheques) and our business volumes all continue to grow month on month - pretty much on or mostly above the planned targets set almost 12 months ago and only slightly modified downwards towards the end of 2008. So we are adopting a conservative approach to the new financial year, although we are budgeting to spend more money than we have spent in the previous five years put together (not that is saying much) in building a much larger sales presence (and who knows - even a marketing program!!!) to promote the HSPA services and perhaps one or two other services. Of course, Exetel is a very, very small company and whatever we do makes absolutely no difference to any company we compete with or to any end users in any marketplace in which we offer services. However it is important to us that we continue to remain financially viable and therefore continue to support our current customers with the lowest priced services it's possible to deliver and therefore protect the jobs of our employees. This requires, as always, a very conservative approach to expenditures and an even more conservative approach to revenue and profit expectations which can get very boring for our more 'adventurous spirits' who would prefer "global domination" to nights of sound sleep free of worrying about how to pay tomorrow's bills. One of our two very aggressive pieces of planning is to more rapidly grow a business sales force by, perhaps and with a large number of "only ifs", as much as 30 additional people over the full twelve month period. Our rationale is that we continue to make progress more rapidly in percentage growth terms in business services than we do in residential services and we have now built the benefits of a five year track record of delivering 99.99% up times to business customers and have still retained over half of the customers who signed up with us 5 years ago as references for continued service excellence. It is a gigantic market with huge potential for even a tiny company like Exetel and we can control the sales cycles involved much better than we can in any other part of our business at the moment. Whether we remain that 'brave' as FY2010 reveals what it is really going to turn out like remains to be seen but we are planning very aggressive growth at this stage. The other 'brave' piece of planning is our promotion costs and personnel costs in attempting to deliver on our desire to build 100,000 HSPA customers by the end of Calendar 2010 and the associated growth of the agent network in rural and regional areas of Australia. This is far more difficult to do than anything else we have ever attempted and we will need new personnel of very different types to those we have worked with over the past five years. So not only is the actual process going to be very difficult the acquisition of two or three key people is going to be a very difficult thing to do before we can make a serious start to the program though, almost certainly because of my procrastinations, we will have to start now rather than when/if we find the people we need to make it as successful as we need it to be. So we have another 24 hours to complete the 'spread sheet' version of FY2010 so it can be considered over the next six weeks and, as always, those pristine spread sheet columns and rows deliver a pleasingly symmetric promise of fiscal safety and acceptable month on month profits delivered by an ever steepening growth curve of increasing customers and revenues for each of the ten products/services. We have kept the business plans in the same Excel spread sheet since we started and so have over 60 months of 'history' that i must turn into a graph one day to show Exetel's performance from January 1st 2004 up to now. I think it would be an interesting 'sales tool' in terms of demonstrating the progress the company has made in terms of number of customers (per product/service) together with revenue, profit and personnel growth over that period. If only 'real life' was like an Excel spread sheet. PS: I couldn't be bothered to mention the rambling mess that was last night's "budget" but I think noted Howard hater, and chief economics writer for the SMH summed it up better than I could ever do here: Tuesday, May 12. 2009"And Now, A Pre-Budget Address .......John Linton ......From A Fat Cat Boss Recipient Of Middle Class Welfare. The Honorable Exploiter From North Sydney" Thank you Mister Speaker. We got a pleasant surprise yesterday when our accountants advised us that our R and D expenditure for FY2008 had been approved and we would be receiving a credit on Exetel's Federal Tax Account of almost $80,000 (being 25% of the approved expenditure on R and D in FY 2008). This is a meaningful amount of tax money to our small company as we make very little profit (by design) and the rebate/credit represents around one third of the federal taxes that Exetel paid last year. So it was a pleasant start to the day. Federal and State taxes, and the increasing number of other related impositions of operating a small business in Australia, particularly NSW, make life much harder than it should be and the re-imposition by the Labor party of their various 'work place relations' restrictions aren't going to make it any easier after July 1st 2009. I understand that everyone involved in owning shares in companies (in their own name rather than through a superannuation fund) and who is a "boss" (in La Guillotine's doctrinaire rantings) is a 'fat cat' that can afford to pay whatever taxes are levied on them. There has never been any other attitude from the Labor party - it is 1920s 'class envy' embedded in the bitter invective that comprises 'union speak' in 21st century Australia - but it does have ramifications. Tonight's budget will ignore the "inflation genie being out of the bottle" which was of such massive concern to Whine in his first budget 'speech' which so clearly demonstrated that he had absolutely no clue about what was happening in the financial marketplaces of May 2008 (the 'GFC' was then four months in to whatever it was at that point in time). There will be, apart from the 180 degree turn around in fiscal views, the usual Labor mean spirited and 'class warfare' approaches to funding the extravagances of $A20 billion in cash giveaways and the stupendously stupid $A300 billion expenditures on obsolete and totally unncessary military hardware (and the dramatically increased personnel costs required to even turn the engines over in that pile of 'new' scrap metal - just what an economy in trouble needs - more military personnel). So no hope for fiscal common sense there. So there will be higher taxes on the companies and the people who are the only hope of generating more revenue for the economy generally and more give aways to people who can't generate any assistance to the economy at a time when the "state of the economy" will be used as the reason for this reverse logic. No problem - vote Labor - get National bankruptcy - never been any different. A combination of higher taxes on companies, higher taxes on the sectors of the people who are capable of repairing the damage to Australia's economy and more draconian employment impositions will be spelled out in gloating detail over the budget introduction tonight and in the follow 'interviews' with the screech owl, Krudd, Ms Wrong and the dental hygiene challenged Whine. Expect to hear thousands of references to 'working families', Krudd's new mantra "...and I make no apology..." as well as Whine's and Krudd's (unconscious?) adoption of sending themselves up by constantly using John Clark's satirising of politicians phrase "Nice to be with you" at the beginning and end of any interview not with Mike Carlton. In the mean time PBG won't be the last Australian 'icon' to close its Australian factories and despite the massive and stupid Krudd handouts to GM, Ford, Chrysler and Toyota to cling on to their SA and VIC marginal seats don't expect those auto companies to survive the next twelve months in Australian manufacturing and.........but you either already know all of this or me adding my few words isn't going to add to your understanding of the topic. So I was delighted to get 25% of Exetel's r and d expenditure back in future tax credits but will not plan to get any future contributions as the likely announcements tonight will make it even more difficult to employ people in Australia by small companies and quite possibly larger companies for that matter. (A reminder of how pervasive the falling interest in employment is in Australia at the moment was driven home to me when I contacted the small recruitment company that Exetel used to employ graduates and was told our contact had been 'downsized' along with half the other employees). Exetel has always done a great deal of r and d, relative to our total salary costs, but it's more than likely that we will employ our future r and d personnel either in Sri Lanka or via contracting in other countries. It makes no sense to conduct our trivial r and d activities in Australia (even with a 25% credit from federal company tax) given the issues soon to be involved with hiring and employing personnel in Australia. Exetel's minute r and d investments are completely irrelevant - but I wonder how other real r and d investors will modify their current opinons over the coming months on where their r and d money is best spent? So - $A20 billion surplus to $A60 billion deficit in 12 months - it's all the fault of the previous government and the GFC. "Nice to be with you - always enjoy talking to working familes and, make no mistake, I make no apology about blaming all my inadequacies on the global financial crisis and the Howard government." Monday, May 11. 2009"Working From Home"......John Linton ...is more possible now than ever in the past for some types of 'white collar' work but is it actually beneficial to either the 'work from homer' or for the entity that employs them? From the time Exetel was brought in to existence it has had employees 'working from home' - Exetel commenced operations from a room in our house and Steve worked from his house in Perth and didn't come to Sydney for a month or so from our start up time. The programmer who wrote all of our initial systems didn't some to work at Exetel's office until we first had a semi-formal office in March 2004. The first four Sri Lankan employees we had started by working from their homes for over two years before we established a presence in Colombo and two of our Level 3 support personnel have never worked at the Exetel office except for their initial familiarization and training always working from their own homes in the ACT and the NSW Central Coast respectively. I work from home more than 50% of the time and Annette seldom goes in to the office at all. So Exetel is fairly experienced in understanding the basic merits and de-merits of employing people who work away from other employees for considerable amounts or 100% of the time over a period of over five years - we have no problem with either the concept or the actuality and have a more than a reasonable knowledge of the up and down sides and other issues. Exetel re-look at this scenario every six months or so and I raised the issue again last week after I had filled in a survey/questionnaire some weeks before for some government department whose name I can't remember and thinking the questions being asked were incredibly naive and/or incredibly doctrinaire though it was hard to tell whether they may well have been both. I think they were doctrinaire rather than naive as, at least as far as I could see, they seemed to assume that it was preferable for people to work from home under all and any circumstances given that there was a very short section, essentially one question, along the lines of "do you think there are any circumstances where working at an office location provides more benefits to the employee than working from home - there wasn't even a reverse question asking whether there were any disadvantages to the employer if the employee worked from home....doctrinaire?....I think so. However after I answered the survey as it didn't take much time and it was getting round to the time to reconsider this question again anyway I subsequently received a telephone call late last week thanking me for submitting the survey (perhaps very few people did?) and asking me some follow up questions including expressing surprise that we already had such a 'policy' in place and had done so for such a long time 'for so many staff'. The follow up questions were not very sensible or even sensibly structured but I answered them as patiently and politely as I could for some 30 minutes and eventually had to say I had no more time after the questions became more and more intrusive. I think the 'surveyor' became very frustrated with me because I wouldn't agree with any of her survey's "suggestions" on the benefits of someone working from home from the employer's view point. Even though Exetel has highly automated systems and, in comparison to any other entity I know, extremely advanced communications systems there are virtually NO advantages to an employer for employees working from home under any circumstances other than one, perhaps one and a half, - and, personally, I think there are many, many disadvantages to both the employee and the employer. The 'one' advantage to the employer for 'allowing' an employee to work from home is that it allows an employer to employ people in diverse geographic locations if they can't find the 'talent' they need within a reasonable traveling distance of the place they need them to work. This is obviously the case with Steve (who lives in Perth and comes to Sydney for a few days each month) and mostly for Annette as she started doing work that was 'part time' and needed zero interaction with anyone else. It was also obvious for the initial employment of personnel in Sri Lanka. Our two Level 3 support engineers were hired in a 'conscious' experiment to determine whether it would work for support to be remote from Sydney prior to our final decision on moving all support to a different country. And that's where the matter rests today for Exetel. The ONLY reason that I think is beneficial for an employer and an employee for the employee to work from home is when a changed travel distance, time and cost become a factor in the employee's life and the employer doesn't want to lose their talents, skills and knowledge. This can happen in any number of ways (some completely rational, or almost, some quite irrational but that's humanity for you) but the end result is the same - an employee whom the employer values is under the burden of excessive travel time (and sometimes cost) which is not a good situation - for either party. I don't take this in to consideration when hiring new employees because I , personally, have always recognised the fact that you should never hire anyone who has to travel more than 45 minutes to work - though I do understand that as cities such as Sydney have grown so big geographically that has to be increased - it actually doesn't change the fact that is highly undesirable for both parties. The nice government survey lady couldn't understand how I couldn't see all her other benefits but actually saw separation from co-workers as a massive social minus as opposed to the four walls and 'limited' human association of the employee's home as THE major disadvantage - particularly for the young age demographic that applies within Exetel. So I suppose the net of my view is that people should select jobs that are as close to where they live as possible and that an employer may mutually agree with an employee who is valuable to the company that they should work from home if they end up living (for whatever reason) so far away that travel is a negative factor in their lives and therefore in their job performance. Maybe I won't fill in the next survey - my answers appear to be as 'helpful' to the 'government' as my answers to their paid maternity leave survey. Sunday, May 10. 2009What Happened To FY 2009?John Linton It came as a jolt to me when my on line reminder system pointed out to me last Friday morning that the first draft of the 2010 plan was due in one week's time. It was a jolt because I had completely forgotten about doing it and by now, in past years, I would have pretty much completed everything rather than, as in this year, not even given it even a preliminary thought. I could make the excuse that financial year planning has been overtaken by the need to deal with the "GFC" and its day by day affects on business generally and Exetel's business in particular - but as I have repeatedly said I can't actually see any difference to Exetel's business except that it continues to grow month on month as it has since January 2004. I don't know what has occupied my time so completely over the last few months that I have forgotten to carry out the planning processes for the next financial year prior to mid - May but it must have been something/range of things including the ravages of advancing age. Now that I look back at the past ten months they have passsed in the metaphorical 'blink of an eye' and I can see little real progress in either our business or in the general comunications 'landscape'. There are the obvious things: 1) Moving our first level support, provisioning and sales equiry functions to Sri Lanka 2) Introducing our HSPA services 3) Starting to build a corporate sales operation 4) 'Re-dimensioning' our network and 'distributing' it 5) Deciding to and then and commencing building hardware 'to our designs' in the PRC rather than taking what we can get from Australian distributors 6) Investing in our own owned premises 7) Investing in our own owned data centre 8.) Deciding and then building our own VoIP 'pabx' and implementing it in two linked countries and multiple Australian operations 9) Continuing to grow the business faster than all of our main competitors 10) Continuing to improve our operational 'world's best practice' measures and simply growing the Exetel business and being involved with those processes over the past ten months have managed to take up so much time that I literally haven't given the planning for FY2010 a moment's thought and I'm pretty sure no-one else within Exetel has either. So I started to look at FY2010 as a 'stand alone' 12 month period yesterday and mapped out some views on what I thought we could make happen in our tiny part of the Australian communications industry. It would be much easier to not do that and simply let the months roll by as quickly as they have over FY2009 but I suppose after all these years I'm a creature of habit. The problem with planning a new year is that you have to start by looking at the current year in terms of the original plan you put in place in May 2008. Not good reading in terms of looking at the objectives set and which were met and, much larger number, which were not met. In summary, and without being overly negative, I can pretty much say that we have met none of the objectives we set in May 2008 and we haven't even got close to starting almost half of them. While it would be false written self flagellation (at least in planning terms) to say we missed every objective completely, what is true is that we commenced every task too late and have made nowhere near the progress we had planned for twelve months ago. While that can be equally truthfully said for most years of my personal planning life, and maybe my fading memory is faulty, I can't remember a year when we missed every objective by quite such wide margins. So, unfortunately, FY2009 is going to turn out to be the least successful year of Exetel's brief existence in terms of meeting objectives. I suppose the only good news is that with such a low benchmark set in FY2009 it will be so much easier to do better in FY2010. So what is it that a tiny communications company should attempt to do in the coming financial year (other than survive which is a given)? The objective we have been making glacially slow progress towards is to increase our business revenue percentage to 50% of our total revenue and to grow our HSPA revenue to 50% of our residential broadband revenue. Those are of course 'macro objectives' to be acheved over an undefined time frame but, nevertheless, with discrete actions put in place each year to move towards their eventual achievement. So setting macro ambitions aside the objectives for 2009 need to be based around: A) Continuing to build a much stronger Agent network in rural/regional Australia - 700 achieving agents being the target B) Continuing to build a corporate sales force achieving $A2 million per month revenue targets by end calendar 2010 C) Building a residential user base of 100,000 HSPA customers, mainly in rural/regional Australia D) Building a VoIP customer base of 250,000 users over both wire line and wireless broadband E) Maintaining the growth/retention of wire line broadband services at their current levels Pretty simple stuff - it took me hardly any time at all to sketch that out and poduce a convincing looking spread sheet - it looked almost as convincing as the plan for FY2009 in fact. I guess I've got seven days to inject some reality in to it. Saturday, May 9. 2009Damn The Torpedos! Full Steam Ahead!John Linton (apologies to Admiral David Farragut for trivialising his famous words). I had three meetings over the past week with major suppliers to Exetel and the message from them was mixed but on the whole opimistic. I never expect to be told the truth by suppliers (or perhaps by anyone else come to think of it) but, allowing for that, their views were pretty much the same as mine in that if there is a recession in Australia and worse to come then there is no particular evidence of it in the communications market generally - at least no evidence beyond the usual handful of telecommunications companies whos CEO's egos far over reach the realities of business common sense. I also talked ith two people who are in the mobile business in the UK. That's a completely different story as these brief articles indicate: and: Apart from illustrating the difficulties in the UK they also indicate the difficulties in other parts of the EU (Deutsche is the largest phone company in the EU dominating the huge German market and operating in practically every other country). So perhaps the insouciance being shown by our Australian suppliers is simply due to the actual effects of an Australian recession not yet making any mark in Australia yet. Hubris, egotism, crass stupidity in the behaviour of Australian Telecommunications CEOs has never been more blatantly obvious than in the resignation of Telstra's CEO and the Chairman whose total ignorance of telecommunicatins in Australia (and also business generally) who appointed him. I read El Sol's self aggrandising puffery 'hand over speech' yesterday with utter amazement as he self extolled his time as Telstra CEO as one long series of massive improvements and successes. There was no mention of the share price or the fact that, single handedly, he has driven Telstra to the point of imminent break up and the end of its cosy large monopoly. Unlike American Civil War Admirals the 'torpedos' (mines) can't be ignored by Australian Telecommunication Company CEOs - even ones that run dominant monopolies and for every Farragut that runs and survives such risks there are 99 who dont make it past the first sand bar in their version of Mobile Bay. Without being pointlessly pesimistic, and bearing in mind that the teleommunications industry is generally regaded as recession proof ,Telstra's top management falling on their collective swords is the most obvious incidence of how recession itself and its affect on revenues/profits isn't the only danger in economic downturns. Adventures like the ones in the UK mobile voice and data markets by huge foreign 'National Carriers' are just reminders to those who would ignore history that leopards changing spots only happens in mythology - it has never been known to happen in modern business. National Carriers that attempt to fight with the National Governemnts that created them is virtually unheard of and in the only previous incidence of which I'm aware 'ended in tears' just like El Sol'd has done - completely insane courses of action doomed before the initial words left his/his 'chairman's' mouth. So too the other, minor, examples ocurring in the lower evels of the Australian communications industry's more egotistically run telecommunication companies - it won't be the "GFC" that brings their adventurism to a sticky end' it will simply be the immutable truths of commerce that have existed for over 4,000 years yet at least aparently, for too many 'business leaders' remain a closed and, presumably, never opened book - if you borrow in a boom you ill be unable to re-pay in a bust. The UK events I alded too should case some of the more ridiculously articulated 'ambitions' stated over the past 12 months or so to be re-looked at by any boards that have any influence over the small telecommunications they have some duty of care for. If the Australian national carrier and the German national carrier (and a large Italian mobie carrier) can't make it in markets dominated yother entrenched poviders then it's a pretty clear indication that there are other things to do with any money and time you might have under your control. Then again - 'there is a sucker born every minute' as a fearsomely successful con man once observed. Friday, May 8. 2009Wasting Money In The World Of BroadbandJohn Linton One of the earler memories I have of IP bandwidh, apart from it being massively expensive in the mid 1990s (around the best part of $US1 million per year per TWO mbps) was the 'care with which it was managed. This was, of course, long before broad band and there was no such thing as downloading movies and TV shows and in those far off dial up days if you could get a flashless and practically graphicless web page to load in less than 20 seconds everyone was happy and didn't understand 'packet loss' and as there were no on line games there was no obsession with ping and trace route (which didn't exist and in fact the main users of those 'tools' today, teenage boys, didn't exist as internet users at all. So it was basically a technical buyer that rapidly spread with a total of something less than 50 mbps of IP connectivity between Australia and the rest of the world with Telstra owning over 90% of that connectivity and charging the few ISPs that existed at that time 30 cents PER MEGABYTE (not gigabyte) if they couldn't afford to buy direct from one of the very few US carriers that could provide trans-Pacific cable capacity (long before Southern Cross). I have an early memory of one ISP I then worked for with their banks of 14.4 kbps modems and racks of inbound PSTN lines and the heat of the inadequately cooled room with the modems (against all manufacturers recommendations) stacked on top of each other dramatically increasing the heat dissipation problems and causing constant modem failures which would go undetected for days and often longer than that) before processes were developed to eliminate that horrible problem. But most of all I remember a much younger 'senior engineer' than he is today attempting to justify why the MRTG report of the day would not be a solid green oblong and enduring the scathing comments by the owner of the company about how he was "throwing money away" because there was some unused bandwidth between 3.30 am and 5.00 am (or whatever) on weekend mornings. That was a long time ago, at least in terms of the cost and price of trans-pacific data transit costs. Today the cost of 2 mbps of trans-Pacific cable is, literally, one one thousandth of the cost it was 15 - 16 years ago but it is still an item that is 'managed' very, very carefully in many ISPs even at today's relatively very low costs. IP transit certainly is no longer the major cost of delivering internet services although, because of the continuing increase in end user customer downloads, quarter on quarter, it is still a significant cost. Managing IP transit capacity and its 'twin', customer connectivity capacity, remains the most important aspect of delivering continuously fast customer transit. This has become much more difficult in at least one way in the 'broadband' era. With dial up there was never any contention on the customer's PSTN line which ws, effectively, a 'nailed down' copper circuit directly between the customer and the ISP - at least for the time the customer was connected to the service. Broadband only provides a PSTN (100% customer usage) line between the customer's residence and the exchange (and in the case of a RIM only to the RIM). From that point onwards the carrier 'aggregates' the traffic of all users onto its own singe (or perhaps redundant) back haul to the closest BRAS and then further aggregates the end user traffic between the BRAS and one or more State switches and then ......you get the picture. Finally the ISP only gets some semblance of control of service delivery when he buys the, again aggregated, bandwidth between the carrier's hand off point and the ISPs PoP/Switch in a State capital city. So the customer and the ISP are entirely at the 'mercy' of the carrier in terms of relying on the carrier to provide sufficient back haul between the end user's exchange/RIM and the carrier's hand off point to the ISP - something that doesn't always happen but which the ISP, in the eyes of the customer, is totally responsible. Fair enough- as far as it goes - which is why every ISP duplicates the carrier's ts and cs in saying delivering any speed ADSL service is "subject to......" and is "not guaranteed in any way....." etc., etc. I suppose that's a very long winded way of saying that virtually no ISP that resells a carrier's service has any control over some significant aspects of the service which can only be solved by the ISP installing it's own DSLAMs and running and maintaining its own back hauls. Exetel doesn't fit in to that category. The point that an ISP like Exetel does become 100% accountable for bandwidth adequacy is from the carrier's hand off point to and from the rest of the world. IP transit (and its associated caching) is the main component of whether the speeds a customer achieves at any specific time of day are adequate or otherwise. In dial up days, before latency sensitive WOW's and Half Lives (I wonder whether the creators of that particular game had a great sense of irony when naming it?) and streaming movies 'off peak' time started at around 10 pm and lasted until around 9 - 10 am the following day. Only a very few people were very interested in sending and replying to emails between those times or doing any of the other, limited things, the internet was used for until relatively recently. So, with the exception of the ISP I referred to earlier who managed to use the 2 mbps of IP transit almost 100%, 100% of the time most MRTG reports would look like the silhouette a two humped camel with practically no usage between midnight and 8 am - a huge waste of a resource that cost so much money. In general terms, if you believed it would be possible to use 100% of the 2mbps 'pipe' a realistic ISP would barely get to use 50% of total theoretical capacity in the dial up days and it didn't get much better until broadband (if 256 kbps culd be called broadband) became available together with 'download management' software that - heavens to Betsy Paw! - this new fangled technical thingummy jig lets me set a download runnin' way after I'm in the land of Nod". It took the US writers of such software a blink of the proverbial eye to promote their products to ISPs as a way of using the "wasted' IP transit capacity between 10.30 pm and 9.00 am and so "off peak" was born. Ever since 1995 I, and I assume a myriad other people responsible for the financial well being of an ISP have been attempting to replicate the 'green oblong' but (unlike the first person I knew who demanded this) using the totality of the bandwidth without ever causing packet loss because too much usage was saturating the available capacity at any point in time. Exetel's "off peak" is currently 12 midnight to 12 noon and we have just introduced a process where any customer can select their off peak period for any given month from three different period (12 - 12, 1 - 1, and 2 - 2). This is the first step along the path leading to the 'Holy Grail" of bandwidth management a "green oblong MRTG report with zero packet loss". Our current utilisation is somewhere North of 85% and we believeit mmay be possible to increase that utilisation, without packet loss, to North of 90% before the end of the calendar year and then North of 95% by the end of calendar 2010. You might think that's a lot of effort to go to far a 10% saving of a cost that will continue to fall and you may well be correct in that view. But there are several other aspects of efficiency gain in IP transit utilisation that significantly add to the simple 10%gain (if in fact that could be achieved). However the real issue is that if any commercial company sees an inefficiency in its operations and makes no attempt to correct it then the whole business will eventually be damaged by the most damaging of all attitudes in commercial life - "that's the way it's always been and there's nothing that can be done about it". In a technology business that has, more times than I can remember, been the beginning of the end for some one or some thing. Thursday, May 7. 2009While All Statistics Have To Be Carefully Understood...John Linton ...these figures from the US are more than a little interesting: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124164303801393063.html My youngest daughter is about to leave home to live in the unit she (and the bank) have recently purchased and as a person whose job and whose leisure time pursuits require constant home internet access she has no intention of installing a telephone line either for voice calls or for ADSL. She will use her mobile for telephone calls and HSPA for internet (in Neutral Bay she can get a 7.2 mbps signal that gives average speeds well above 2 mbps). Looking at the trends in the cited report it seems that many people are now making the decision that they don't need a home land line for either voice or data and are more than happy to use a mobile phone and wireless broadband - there's the obvious cost saving but it also is something else - an indication that, at least, for young professionals "super fast internet" is not a higher priority than cost.....or that's what I understand these statistics to mean. As someone who is far from young, but does use the internet constantly I have also never had a need for anything faster than 1 mbps or whatever my previous broadband services have delivered over the past 7 years - and my usage averages 10 - 12 hours each day. I, of course, am aware that ping speeds and download speeds are a matter of life and death for some types of residential internet users but it will be interesting to see, over the coming year or so, just what percentage of total broadband users those types of users really represent. For the majority of business use and virtually all of my 'leisure use' (which includes live baseball games from the USA) my HSPA service comfortably handles my personal needs. My major interest in "speed vs cost" at the moment is based on how successful Telstra will be/is being in using its claims of 20 mbps+ speeds to sell its HSPA services. While I understand that the 'more intelligent buyer' will read the disclaimers and be able to work out for themselves that 20 mbps will translate into something far less than that in most individual cases it is still a powerful message for the less intelligent/research minded buyer - pretty much as the wire line broadband services are selected on faster claimed speeds are more important than actual speeds and faster speeds generally are better than slower speeds - although for a large percentage of users speed is never going to have any effect on their actual usage. Should the US statistics prove to be accurate for the current situation and should that trend continue then it appears that at least part of the broadband market (including people as different in their broadband 'needs' as me and my youngest daughter) prefer lower cost over 'super fast speed' and that the blanket assumption that speed is everything is, in fact, not really going to be as compelling (assuming it actually is) in tougher economic times as it may have been to date. It is a very big 'if' but it's ramifications are even bigger. One swallow doesn't make a summer etc, etc....but I think there is more 'sophistication/knowledge' being applied to a slowly growing percentage of broadband selection today than there was 2 - 3 years ago. I see this partly in the number of Exetel customers who downgrade ADSL1 speed plans increasing over the past two years as well as the continuing increase in the number of Exetel users who downgrade ADSL2 plans to less included peak allowances as they realise they can download while they are asleep and use the files they downloaded at some future time rather than thinking they need to "download while they watch". As we embark on a program to 'double our user base' by putting considerable efforts in to HSPA services in rural/regional Australia I obviously have a deep interest in the concepts of getting rid of wire line services to emphasise the cost advantages of HSPA (and to provide another 2 gbs 'for fee'). Our future pans will obviously emphasise the use of VoIP and ATA included routers as well as Yagi aerials and low cost HSPS modem capability making the 'dongle/stick' unnecessary. But the major 'battle' will remain the much faster downloads via ADSL2 and, at least currently, the much lower cost of data using wire line services. Those issues will never be overcome and if they remain 'essential' then we will have a much tougher time to make HSPA the service of choice for a larger percentage of users. The elimination of the land line rental will be a significant issue in this "battle" as the $A30.00+ per month plus the expensive call costs can be used for another 2 - 3 gb of data which is going to be important. However the 'uncertainties' of getting rid of the land line ("emergencies") are going to be difficult to overcome and while VoIP is very commonly used now the set up and 'fear' is another issue to be addressed. Like any marketplace, broadband users will continue to become more knowledgeable about more aspects of broadband as they become more familiar with it....it will be very interesting to see if the 'no wire line' household percentage in Australia follows the trend in the USA - and even more interesting to see what happens in rural/regional Australia. Then again if these ACMA statistics are vaguely correct (courtesy of Rick) then Australia is not at all similar to the USA: Wednesday, May 6. 2009What Is Exetel?....John Linton .....and why would it possibly matter? Not having been involved with advertising agencies for so long I have completely forgotten anything I may have ever known about the processes and the just, to me, plain 'weirdness' of how, apparently, the creative mind works, it has been a bit traumatic for me over the past few days to talk to various people about how Exetel might be able to accelerate the provision of wireless data services in rural and regional Australia. Having had to tell someone whose knowledge of Exetel is zero about what we are trying to accomplish goes sort of OK in all but one case but the situation/conversation goes rapidly downhill from there. It starts getting difficult from the time the same question is asked which is basically "What is Exetel"? or words to that effect but grinds to a complete halt when the follow up question of "what is the profile of the person you are aiming the product at" elicits an inability to answer by me - even when I've made several attempts at defining both the service and the sort of people I would think would be interested in acquiring it by citing the most generic examples that have actually happend. It's clearly yet another indication of my inability of expressing even simple thoughts in ways that are comprehensible to other human beings. So after the first two failures and before the third failure I collected 11 wireless data advertisements from seven different suppliers/carriers and tried to look at them in the context of the questions I was being asked and sent them to the third recommended agency as examples of what the carriers and some of the carrier's resellers thought was appropriate for their aimed at potential buyers. I could discern no answers to the two questions that defied my ability to answer as all I could see were pricing options of a crudely defined service that seemed to me to require a person to know what it was and to be making a decision based on a price comparison with, in the case of Telstra, accepting the unsupported, and almost certainly untrue claim in anything but a general sense, that it was "the fastest". However it apparently made it crystal clear to the third agency exactly what each of the seven companies "were" and exactly "what person they were aiming the product at" - though when I asked what that might be they seemed as inept as I had been in spelling that out to me - a 'non-advertising' person obviously is unable to see the nuances in the ads that conveys that information. So, before I give up and rely on my own lack of knowledge I am trying one last time to see if I can provide enough information to allow a 'creative' and perhaps even a 'knowledgeable' person/group of people to design a promotion program for us that will meet our objectives of selling 100,000 wireless data services in a realistic time frame. These are the answers to the questions asked by the fourth advertising agency. Any ideas you may have that would better define/add to the clarity/completely change to make it better would be welcome Exetel want to sell 100,000 wireless data services in rural and regional Australia. Exetel buys the base service from Optus and then adds various ‘values’ to it to attempt to differentiate it from the same service sold directly by Optus Retail, Optus/Virgin and a number of other wholesale customers including Dodo, Internode and Westnet. This may be an issue facing a brand or an opportunity to take advantage of. Can this be re-framed in an inspiring way? Over time we would be able to improve this initial offer further by adding much lower cost modems and much lower cost routers.
Speed, reliability and price are the driving factors in the purchase of wireless data services and are dominant in the carrier's advertising. How are we hoping to exploit this?
How can we describe the target audience so that we like and respect them? Think of them as people and not consumers. Be sure you are describing there people at the time in their lives that is the most appropriate for the brand – are we appealing to their maternal side, the career person, rebellious etc. Oh dear – I’m the wrong person to be writing these replies. I guess we are appealing to two major aspects of their lives: Why should these people believe what we are going to say? Because we won’t be saying anything that cannot be proven by either information on our web site or by an agent demonstration. If I could write the ad I wouldn’t be looking for expert help. What tone of voice will be unique for the people we are talking to? Be precise and exclusive with the words you choose rather than vague and inclusive. Think about a tone of voice that could only describe our brand. Ensure that the words really do describe a personality or tone. Don’t use the words fun, approachable, positive or sociable. These are the tools of a tired brief writer! Funnily enough I didn’t use those words before I read this section – they would have induced nausea. We believe that the pricing set out below is the best available from any provider of these services in Australia. Additionally the 'standard inclusions' and user benefits together with the high levels of service reliability make a compelling case for any customer to select Exetel as its ADSL service provider. Should you still be considering another provider perhaps you might like to consider that as well as saving yourself money by choosing Exetel you will also help save Australia's most endangered flora and fauna, make a contribution to green house gas reduction and provide more opportunities for people in the third world. If you have time, click on the icons below to see how you can also help make the world a better place while saving yourself some of your hard to come by dollars. http://www.exetel.com.au/fauna_feat/
Tuesday, May 5. 2009No Time To Make 'Yesterday's' Decisions.....John Linton ....let alone making today's decsisions. I think that the only thing worse than being responsible for various aspects of running a small Australian communications company in difficult financial times is running a small Australian communications company in times that are not particularly difficult but might become so. In uncertain times it seems to me that you actually can't make any decision without continually reconsidering (I suppose I really mean worrying) about whether you've done the right thing/made the right decision. As there are always new things that need to be considered/worried about it doesn't take long for what remains of your mind to be fully occupied with decisions that have already been made rather than leaving the requisite time for decisions that have yet to be made and often meaning those decisions don't get made within the required time frames. ...and I'm not referring to routine decisions such as the recent decision on which IP provider will we use or what pricing we will set for our various products and services and the other day to day decisions that can have easily understood criteria applied to the decision making process. One thing that has been 'under consideration' for almost six months is what, if any, sort of advertising/promotion Exetel should do for the HSPA services which we believe are important to our future. Though as things tend to do in this industry, even the assumption that HSPA is important to Exetel in Australia is increasingly being re-thought - but that makes everything far too complicated so we'll take it that HSPA is important - at least for the time being. We believe that HSPA is important because we can add more value to that service than any other. By adding value I mean that we can source the USB modems at a lower price than our wholesaler is selling them to other wholesale customers and we can source Yagi aerials (for those customers who need them) at much lower prices than are available anywhere else in Australia. One day we will be able to source the 'magic box' at a very low price as well. So our thinking has been that HSPA in regional/rural Australia is not something that is best sold by Dodo's/Virgins/Optus Retail/Vodafone Retail/BigPonds saturation advertising but really requires a local presence (in our case an Exetel agent) who can sell the 'easy' customers via a shopfront or his/her usual methods but can also make very good profits by selling the hardware (aerials, modems. ATAs) at high margins (courtesy of Exetel's "buying power") but still at end user costs below those offered by anyone else.....and of course they can sell their installation services where those are applicable. Plus - we will pay for their advertising which will promote their business generally. It seemed like a great combination when we 'dreamed it up'. Now, one issue that has played a major part in the uncertainty has been the likely pricing by the various carriers. It seems that all of the carriers (with the exception of '3') have exhausted their "I can offer more for less than you can" promotional phases - at least for the time being, and are 'content' to sell at their current price points at the moment. While that is of no help to Exetel (all the carriers plans to end users are at lower costs than we can buy at wholesale) it is at least some sort of 'stability' compared to the whole of 2008 and the first 6 weeks of 2009. Perhaps that will not turn out to be true but even if it doesn't we believe that the hardware pluses above plus the free 100 VoIP over HSPA calls plus the free faxes and free SMS will make a very powerful regional/rural offering backed by advertising and 'feet on the ground'....that's the theory. We originally (back in October 2008) planned on spending some $350,000 over three months to promote HSPA in regional/rural areas of Australia. As we have shlly shallied about what we would exactly do we have realised that we actually don't know how to most effectively spend that money and having talked to a number of "experts" have been advised that we need to spend closer to $A2 million over 6 - 9 months to achieve the aims we believe are the minimum we need to achieve.....to me that is a seriously scary number and if I was ever going to spend $A2 million of my own money it wouldn't be on promoting HSPA (or anything else for that matter) it would be on a small house in the South of France or the Caribbean or something of personal comfort and ongoing value. It doesn't help that Exetel has never spent any money on promotion/advertising and that no-one in our small company has any experience at all in that sort of activity. However, we need to do something along the lines of country advertising and promotion and also need to put in place the processes that are required to deal with the results of those activities and, right now, I haven't got a clue how to do this. I will talk to another 'expert' later this morning and then will have to make a decision on what we will do and, far more importantly, the time frame in which it is possible to do it. We will run a small sample test by putting a quarter page ad in 5 or 6 local newspapers over the next 2 - 3 weeks in conjunction with some of our regional agents and one test advertisement with our own contact number on it to attempt to gauge the level and types of responses - and that's as daring as we have screwed up our courage to become at the moment. There are three other similarly difficult issues, of a similar financial impact, that we need to address at this time but they also keep getting deferred as we wait for some indication of what is really going to happen in Australia financially and economically. They look like having to wait an extra six months for go/no go consideration just as the HSPA promotion has. Monday, May 4. 2009Who Could Possibly Object To Black Listing Child Pornography Sites?.....John Linton ....apart from those relatively few people who suffer from paedophlia? .......it would be hard to find anyone I would have thought. So the 'debate' about banning child pornography on the internet should never have existed in the first place - as Stupid Stephen and Krudd attempted to do in trying to kill the opposition to their attempts to legislate using a completely different 'black list' which was not restricted to child pornography at all but to a whole range of wowserism and political doctrine issues which was also riddled with errors. So, their, (Stupid Stephen's and Krudd's) lying and then gross stupidity in labelling people who objected to banning on line gambling sites et alia as child pornographers has completely destroyed 'the debate' but worse than that it has shifted opposition to "banning child pornography" to actually objecting to government/wowserism censorship - a very, very different issue entirely. So the real issues now are quite simple: 1) Does operating a child pornography black list impose any slow down at all on non-child pornography users of the internet 2) Is it possible for the Labor Party government to now convince, firstly the Senate and then the Australian electorate, that it can be trusted to move from it's ACMA list of God knows what URLs to one that had only child pornography. Following the trial Exetel has just completed it seems to me that: 1) above is capable of being demonstrated as being totally achievable as the results published here clearly indicate which replicate results achieved in Sweden: http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=31857 For those people who believe the IWF is something different to what it actually is this recent article should clarify some of the more ridiculous assertions: http://www.prlog.org/10222199-iwf-hits-back-at-censorship-and-secrecy-claims.html The Exetel trial showed that 'false positives' can be eliminated and that no user noticed slower speeds as indeed the monitors that Exetel ran clearly indicated. 2) has been made much more difficult now for the Labor party because of the sheer dishonesty constantly deployed by Stupid Stephen and Krudd in claiming that any one opposing the use of the ACMA list was a child pornographer and thus consigning themselves to being regarded as liars, charlatans and discussion bullies and therefore incapable of being trusted not to impose political and ideological censorship rather than a flawed attempt at reducing the availability of child pornography in Australia. (flawed because of the ease of which it can be 'got round') This trial also demonstrated WHY a child pornography filter is necessary; in that in a five day period there were 20,000 'hits' on the 198 urls (that allegedly are part of an IP range that do contain child pornography but not necessarily the actual IP; i.e the figure of 20,000 doesn't represent that there were 20,000 hits on the actual CP IP only on the IP range) and if you consider that Exetel has only around 1% of internet users in Australia then.......you might, as I was, be more than a little surprised at how many paedophiles that implies there are in Australia (not 20,000 at Exetel but perhaps 100+). When I checked it may be possible based on the BT figures cited here from three years ago: http://www.out-law.com/page-6615 ....bearing in mind that these ban lists have been in operation in the UK since the late 1990s and it would be reasonable to assume that as paedophiles realise they can be tracked by accessing child pornography sites they will find ways round the ban list and therefore you would expect the numbers of "old" paedophile net users to be aware of the blocks to not register after the first two or three experiences - in Australia this wouldn't be the case as there have been no ban lists in operation. Of course the trial Exetel did, or the trials anyone else has done or might subsequently do, will not stop the mildly technically competent internet users availing themselves of the myriad of tools to use some form of remote proxy to access any list of blocked sites and, personally not knowing any paedophiles, I don't know how their internet knowledge ranks in them being able to do that. So I think the Labor party has got itself in to yet another major mess and in, yet another, situation (like the NBN, Global Warming, The about to be canceled tax cuts replaced by the about to be tax increases and the.......nominate your own total screw up inflicted on the country since those of you who are responsible voted these muppets in to running Australia). Basically they have to decide on shelving black listing child pornography (because that is what a back down will mean) or they have to scrap their ACMA list and find a substitute that is acceptable to the Senate and the wavering Labor voters before the next election. They no longer have the cop out of "it won't work technically". They now have to demonstrate that they have a few principles - well......at least one of the ones they "won the last election with". ...and you know what?....and I know you think I'm biased.....I think you'll find that this bunch of uneducated and pig ignorant clowns don't even have ONE principle between them as will be evidenced by their actions on this issue. Perhaps after Whine/Krudd's budget next week neither you nor I nor any other Australian will care any more when the wasteland that Australia has been made into by these economic Vandals will become more apparent. Never mind, Krudd thinks that Australians don't need promised tax cuts and an optimistic future he thinks $A300 billion (which will have to be borrowed so you can pay even more taxes to pay the interest on it) is better spent in the US and the EU buying obsolete military toys which will never be used. No previous Labor 'government' has ever been that stupid - it was almost the only thing a Labor government could be relied on not to do....Krudd continues to set new standards in egotistic incompetence that make Whitlam look like, well, someone other than Whitlam who defined the new high of gross incompetence married to a giant ego in Australian prime ministers and the ability of one man's mindlessness to destroy Australia's economy in the shortest possible time. Sunday, May 3. 2009Another Icon Of My Business Youth Hits Hard TimesJohn Linton Never mind the Chrysler bankruptcy and the GM share price - they are almost inevitable because those two companys, between them, make all the worst cars in the world and someone, presumably the US car buying public, finally noticed....it's therefore understandable. But this, at least to me, isn't: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124109071922972829.html Sure mobile handset sales are down significantly and Motorola's handsets haven't kept their appeal over the last year or so but that isn't the whole of Motorola's business activities. The Motorola I remember (from my boyhood if you count the early transistor radios of the 1950s as 'a technology product') was an electronics innovator across a wide spectrum of product and industry types who made some of the very best technology products I was aware of over the years. Motorola had the dream that was the Iridium project - the first concept of a truly worldwide mobile telephone service using 77 LEOs (hence the name Iridium for that element's atomic number). That fantastic project almost sent them bankrupt trying to make that quantum leap in mobile phone and data technology viable but, alas, they were some 20 years before their time. and wrote it all off when they couldn't solve the hanset size and aesthetics and had cost over run problems. I first visited Motorola in the 1970s at their head office in Schaumberg Illinois but my fondest memories are from the very early 1980s of their Tempe Arizona R and D facilities for wireless products and high end computers. I saw the initial pans for Iridium there but mainly I was looking at their 'campus' style wireless networking products. They were trialing true high speed wireless networking while 'over the border' Bob Metcalfe was showing the world (including me) the advantages of thick Ethernet networking in the start up days of 3Com. So Motorola were already developing 'wifi' while Metcalfe was still struggling to make the world understand the concept of connecting hundreds of computers together over one 'piece of wire' talking to each other via some esoteric concept of 'collision detect'. So I associate Motorola with wireless innovation for the past three decades and it's sad to see such an amazingly innovative company falling on hard times when such a company should be doing so well. One more reminder that its engineers and 'risk takers' that drive the communications industry not financial controlers and "I only owe a duty of care to my shareholders" CEOs.....or far worse....governments that think they can correctly call technology futures...come to think of it....it explains Australia's current situation. In 'past lives' I have wasted a lot of years in my attempts to innovate in technology with the 'grand vision' concepts of doing things in and for Australia that would be truly beneficial to the country of my adoption. Predictably, those efforts ended badly for everyone concerned and it's a long time since I have thought about taking the sorts of risks required to make even a tiny dent in the development of advantageous technology in this country. For every Microsoft and Intel there are hundreds of thousands, almost certainly millions, of start up failures - irrespective of how innovative, and useful, their ideas, technology and go to market dreams were. So I feel sadness when I read articles like the one I've referenced but it reminds me that I was very foolish to make my own pathetically small and woeful attempts to bring new technologies to Australia and to attempt to make financial sense of those attempts. It may mean I learned one lesson over the decades though, in participating in the start up of Exetel, I certainly haven't remembered the other, incredibly painul, lesson I thought I had learned which was NEVER AGAIN be involved in the ownership or start up of a small technology business in Australia. Some, really stupid, people never learn. I remain concerned at the likely financial problems that seem to be widely predicted for later this year in Australia and I endlessly look at our own small company's plans for the coming months and the 'pointers' of future performance in the monthly results for the previous 10 months of the current financial year. I simply don't have the knowledge or skills required to make predictions about the financial future for anything including our small company. I can look at our financial plans and see nothing other than growth at profitable levels of whatever we choose to make them - as long as we are sensible in our aspirations. I can't see where the predicted major problms are going to come from and I don't seem to be able to find anyone with whom we are associated with in business, including our banks and insurers, who is able to provide any better views than those we have formed ourselves. While I am typing this, Whine is on the ABC making his nonsensical claims about what Labor has done and is doing to "protect the jobs of all Australians" and "how clueless the Coalition is about fiscal policy" and I don't get a feeling of having a government that has got a clue - but you may think that is my personal bias - which it may well be but, you know, even in my pig ignorance of matters financial, I can see that spending $A300 billion in the coming years on military toys from the world's armament manufacturers isn't going to help Australians at all and is yet another 'back of the bus ticket' political stupidity. Back to reality - it seems that we will have to 'wait and see' what's going to happen in Australia and hope that it is going to be no worse than the past recessions (which were truly dreadful for a large number of people) and that we, personally and for Exetel, are able to adapt to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in as the months reveal their secrets. Saturday, May 2. 2009When Your Supplier Is Your Most Aggressive Competitor......John Linton .....how do you manage to stay in business? El Sol with his stated position that: "Wholesale customers are parasites" will soon pack up his millions and return to rhe USA to find his next employer having 'done a Krudd' and set a new speed record for reducing a thriving econonomy (commercial entity) to ruins but as this article in yesterday's Australian gives a sober reminder Telstra, virtually from its inception, may well have always seen ethics and legal requirements as unnecessary impediments to its own interests: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25414690-15306,00.html Of course, perhaps Telstra is going to appeal the decision, it seems to use the appeal process as a mandatory method of ensuring its competitors spend as much money as possible and wait as long as possible while attempting to address what they believe are predatory/incorrect actions by Telstra, so perhaps some appeal judges will find that this apparently totally unethical and just plain illegal behaviour by Telstra was a flight of whimsey by the Federal Court judge on an 'off' day and Telstra's reputation, which it sojealous about guarding, remains unsullied and stays the 'colour' it has always been.. If Telstra either doesn't appeal or its appeal is not upheld then what is there to make of the sort of management that must have existed within Telstra between 1993 and 2000? It can hardly be 'a once off error' for Telstra Wholesale to have provided Telstra retail with detailed information about Optus business numbers for an 8 year period now can it? It was, if it in fact proves to be the case after any appeal, only be a deliberate attempt, over an extended period of time, by both Telstra Wholesale and Telstra Retail to continually act completely unethically and completely illegally. The obvious conclusion, as is always the case, is that "and this is just one instance that has been prosecuted and ruled on by a Federal Court judge". If this unethical and illegal behaviour is so entrenched and endemic that it has apparently been shown to have been perpetrated over an 8 year period in this instance why would anyone believe that this lack of ethics and illegal behaviour was 'magically' restricted to the instances of this particular law suit rather than being indicative of a culture within Telstra that was endemic in every aspect of the treatment of wholesale customer operational information? Only a truly naive person would think that was the case. Not that it means anything in reality (other than Optus, in this instance, might get some financial relief - after almost 20 years of operational disadvantage) as cultures of commercial entities don't get changed by the occasional legal set back and if there is a culture of unethical behaviour and disregard for the law within any entity that has gone on for 20 years it has, in such a time frame, infected every 'department' and person which/who has been involved over that time and all of the people that they have become involved with. So all of Telstra's whoesale customers have had to cope with 'playing 5 card draw poker with all their cards face up' and the fact they are, mostly, still in business means that Telstra's other policies (of charging sky high prices as an example) has allowed them to survive but has ensured they make less money than they may have been able to otherwise have done......one of the reasons, perhaps, for that oft quoted figure (that I can't remember seeing any evidence for) that Telstra has 70% of the Australian telecommunications business but makes 90% of the Australian telecommunications profits. One day things may change but business is all about dealing with the 'status quo' and not complaining about 'fairness' - change what you can and don't bitch about what you can't - it's childish. As Arnie, in his Mr Kimble character, once said - "Stop whining". I looked through the April figures last night (and the May bill run) and see no changes to the Exetel business which is showing continued growth at pretty much the planned levels across almost all service/product categories. If the 'recesssion' is 'beginning to bite' there's nothing in our operating figures that indicates that is the case - at least not that I can see. I would like to see more growth in HSPA but we will need to make much more effort for that to happen and I remain pleasantly surprised at the continuing growth of the VoIP businesses. I was also surprised at last month's profit wich was far higher than planned (better that way than the reverse but still not desirable) and have yet to work out why that was. I have little doubt that things will get worse generally and they may well get worse for Exetel (the court ruling referenced at the start of this entry is a timely reminder that you cannot ever take anything for granted in business). So perhaps the 'brick wall' is around the next metaphorical corner and we will have to make some drastic changes to our current plans....I have no idea....it all looks OK to me at the moment. |
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