John Linton
.....with July now almost 'August'.
The new financial year has got off to a good start though there is some indication that more than a few Exetel people are suffering from 'shell shock' due to the number of new initiatives that have been put in 'train' and the number of new 'directions' we are beginning to take. Orders are very robust across our ten products/services and our new initiatives have all made positive starts though, of course, these are very early days. We finally got the Tasmanian PoP operational with the first connections now live which was very positive - to hit our first major mile stone on time in a long series of network changes in FY2010.
On a slightly negative note I was sorry to have to 'give away' our pursuit of the 12 hour free period each day but after so many years of trying to get that offering to work effectively I have given up, at least for the time being, as I just can't make it happen. I will miss the 'competitive advantage' and also, and mostly, the simple elegance of 12 hours 'free' each day but neither I, nor anyone else within Exetel, can find a way of offering it at this point of our development. However there simply isn't any more time (and certainly no more money) to pursue that 'holy grail' after over five years of failure and it was too much of a distraction to continue wasting any more of our scarce management and technical resources attempting to make it 'happen'. It is a weight off my mind not having to try any more and I'm sure it's a relief to the network engineers. It clears the way for many things to happen and allows us to deploy scarce resources to other developments that have been held up while we made our last attempts to 'solve' this issue. Sometimes you just have to accept that something really is too difficult to make happen.
I may well not have noticed any changes that may have been happening in ISP land lately as I haven't being paying too much attention to the Australian media and when I do it seems to be 'drowning' in various NBN2 non-stories for anything else to be discerned but based on the odd thing I pick up here and there from 'insiders' there seems to be nothing much happening - perhaps because all the larger ISPs are planning their involvement in getting a chunk of the NBN2 'pie'. One thing that has been contunuously mentioned to me is that HSPA sales were booming all over the country by all mobile carriers and the predictions that HSPA users would exceed wire line internet users by the end of 2012 was well on 'target'. It was an interesting piece of information as I could vaguely remember Telstra making such an estimate (I think that was even more extreme - 75%?) and I have read about similar estimates in the EU but not, strangely, in the UK.
We continue to move forward with our own HSPA 'campaign with the first TV advertising 'tests' being run yesterday and almost everything else needed just about completed (web site, back end processes, printed material, agent acquisition program etc). It is going to be an interesting few months, between now and Christmas, to see what can be achieved by a very small company with a set of different approaches and I am looking forward to contributing to doing the real work involved in making it happen - in whatever ways we can. Never having done something like this before it will be quite interesting to see what can be done and how much we have to change and modify our initial ideas (and budgets) and to find out whether it is actually possible to make work.
As the Exetel HSPA user base continues to slowly grow we learn more quickly about how better to provide and support the services and how to generally improve many aspects of getting the most out of the current wireless infrastructures and smooth out the 'bumps'. It is a very steep learning curve and we have a very long way to go but if the forecasts of the take up in wireless broadband made by the various sources is anything like correct it is going to be a very important thing (set of things) to learn how to do and do 'right'. I am curious about what I see from the different companies 'marketing' the various different carrier's HSPA services (and the marketing done by the carriers themselves of course). I am having a lot of problems attempting to work out what they are aiming at in terms of any sort of specific marketplace (geographic, education level, age group or anything else) as I can't see any pattern and many of the claims seem quite outrageous to me - at least based on my own experience and from what our users tell us.
Personally, I'm a very happy Exetel HSPA user (both mobile hand set and computer) and the majority of my personal acquaintances who are using Exetel (because of my recommendation) are as happy as I am with only two people having anything negative to say and that's readily acknowledged to be a coverage problem unrelated to the general usage of the service. Apart from the strange customer who claimed it was unusable, after he had used up 5 gb in 8 days, I haven't seen any bad customer feedback from people who use it in realistic coverage areas. I am assuming (as someone who remembers the early days of mobile telephone networks when Optus first offered mobile services) that coverage will only continue to improve as the user base and geographic location grows.
What obviously needs to happen is for pricing of data to continue to fall and for more capacity per user to be deployed on an ongoing basis by all of the mobile carriers. This 'must' happen and I personally have no doubts that it will but I have no ideas of any actual plans or development time frames....I am just basing that statement on previous experience and logic. I will be interested to see what has happened in the UK in September in terms of both coverage (in the very rural places we always end up in) and sustainability of speed in those places at night which was a bit of a problem last year.