Monday, September 21. 2009Fatalities And FatalismJohn Linton
After that re-introduction to the realities of Sri Lankan road travel we had an uneventful flight back to Bangkok and spent the afternoon looking at sapphires and rubies which, because of the International gem stone fair just finishing were at even greater bargain prices than usual - made even better still due to the appreciation of the $A exchange rate against the Baht since we were here a year ago. It always surprises me that gem stones in Bangkok are between one fifth and one tenth what they are in Australia. On the relatively short flight between Colombo and Bangkok I did some work on new ADSL2 plans that we are considering for October or, at the latest, November 1st. As it's 35 degrees at the moment I had no inclination to leave the hotel after participating in the afternoon shopping trip and left Annette to her own devices while I played around with some new numbers. Steve has got some new pricing from a number of our suppliers and we will be able to form a much better opinion this coming Thursday and Friday. I understand that I have been away for over three weeks now and have become very relaxed (comparatively) as you tend to during a sensible length vacation but it seems to me that there are indications that the overall reductions in IP pricing and the general reductions in support and other key operating costs can result in both lower end user prices and significantly different delivery models to the ones that have been in place for the best part of the whole time ADSL hs been made available to Australian users. Whether I understand the various different ADSL buyer profiles is another matter altogether and I am pretty sure I don't. Having acknowledged that ignorance it still seems to me that for Telstra et alia to have remained fixated on providing base ADSL services with very low included data allowances the reality of the ACTUAL ADSL market is that a very large proportion of current users don't actually download very much at all - and that has been their custom for many years now - month after month. If that is the case then it re-enforces my belief that it is an exploitable opportunity as I commented on a few days ago. Depending on what Steve has negotiated, and I haven't discussed it with him since I have been away, it should be looking like a cost of slightly sub 30 cents per customer gigabyte delivered during peak and around half that in off peak. An ADSL2 'line' (ULL) costs Exetel slightly less than $A20.00 (inc gst) and the associated telephone line costs a little less....in some particular cases it can be as much as $5.00 (inc gst) less. If these prices are correct than it seems a sensible thing to do would be to simply offer PAYU plans at a base cost for the ADSL service plus a base cost for the telephone service (if required) and then simply charge for data downloaded at a rate of $A0.50 peak and $A0.25 off peak - or something like that. I haven't looked at what other ISPs are doing in terms of passing on the benefits of the raft of cost reductions that are becoming more and more apparent over the past few months (all I have seen is the move by AAPT to offer unlimited off peak downloads on which I've previously commented) and we would obviously need to do that before making any decisions but it all looks very interesting. I think something(s) are long overdue to happen in the Australian ADSL market as the 'meee tooooism' has reached a crescendo and if the ABS figures do continue to show that the ADSL market has peaked and may well start to exhibit negative growth then there will have to be some fairly significant changes. It will be interesting to see who is the first to 'break ranks' and offer a no BS plan that simply expects the user to pay for what they use at the lowest possible per gb rate possible with no 'smoke and mirrors'. Sounds simple - but as with "mobile cap plans" the buying public may not want to actually have simple facts to base their buying decisions on. Monday, September 21. 2009Wildlife Conservation Is Not A Modern ConceptJohn Linton One of the reasons that Annette and I took an extra day out of our '25 centuries ago, Arahat Mahinda, a Buddhist monk and son of Emperor Ashoka of India, told the then King of Ceylon: "O Great King, the birds of the air and the beasts have an equal right to Acting on these words King Devanampiya Tissa established the world's first So, at least in mythology, Sri Lanka was the pioneer of wildlife conservation long before the So, with that quote firmly in my mind, it was disappointing to learn a The privately funded organisation we met with was the Sri Lankan Wildlife They do this via an almost reverse conservation This system has worked well and is well documented around the world where However they also talked of an even more ambitious program that would be a triple whammy Both the second and third concepts provide a true change to 3,000,000 people's lives and help the Sri Lankan elephant population. We hope |
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