John Linton
Exetel has been offering mobile telephone services for over five years now. It has never been a major, or even very large, part of our overall business but we have always seen it as 'strategic' and for those Exetel users that have one or more mobile services with us it seems our very different approach to pricing suits them better than the plethora of mobile offers on the market as they seem to stay with us once they start using the service.
Our pricing is very different as it is overwhelmingly based on an easy to understand, and very low, set of per minute rates (charged per second) and reflects my personal distaste for the obvious dishonesty of 'capped plans' and the assumption of buyer stupidity on which such plans are based - although I have given in to the 'pleas' of the person responsible for managing the mobile and other telephone services over the past 12 months or so in allowing the offer of mobile services not based on simple to understand low cost rates to 'creep in' to the Exetel offerings.
Our mobile business is small, and compared to our other supplier purchases largely irrelevant I would have thought, but it hasn't stopped two other mobile carriers from persistently trying to obtain that business that has been with the same Vodafone reseller since the beginning. Without buying in to the 'coverage is inadequate in my location' issues (which I can never duplicate on the few occasions I have tried) there is a persistent perception that Optus has a better coverage, particularly in 'country' areas than Vodafone and as we make continuing efforts to build our 'country' agent network that is getting more 'listening time'.
We received the 'latest' alternative proposal while I was in the UK and having read it I dismissed it as, yet again, following the mobile carrier model of smoke and mirrors deception and bordering on dishonesty which I so abhor about all of the mobile marketing I have ever been exposed to. What is wrong with these people that they find it impossible to set rates that are simple, make money for the carrier themselves on a minute used/minute paid for basis and don't need to be tied to minimum spends and convoluted 'packaging'? Why do they have to be so complicated that it is impossible to actually work out what you actually have to pay for your planned mobile usage? Are the people that set these plans so personally dishonest that the concept of prices per minute simply don't exist in the larcenous world they have built in terms of pricing a mobile telephone minute of use?
Now, I absolutely fully understand that our mobile minutes per month are insignificantly small and that no self respecting mobile service marketer has the slightest interest in what we do - I never asked them to be interested or bother themselves with providing us with a quote to do business with them. They, or presumably their sales people, insisted that they bid for our insignificantly small business so we insisted on getting their bid in terms of prices per minute billed per second - which is what we have received since we first offered a mobile service and what we are quite happy to stay with - because it suits Exetel's way of doing business - simple and low cost with no smoke and mirrors and we understand that is not going to produce any sort of 'volume' that would interest a mobile carrier.
I listened, again, to the person responsible for the mobile services yesterday trying to convince me that I should change the decision not to accept the new 'offer' but I simply cannot see how becoming as 'crooked' as every other supplier of mobile telephone services does Exetel or its customers any good or what one more tiny mobile telephone service reseller adds to the Australian marketplace except one more set of deceptive product presentations. I don't believe in "free" hand sets, 1 million minutes for $A49.95, or "data included" mobile offerings any more than I believe in the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny and I have enough vestigial respect for the intellectual abilities of my 'fellow man' to assume they aren't all totally moronic - but apparently I am the one who is wrong and the overwhelming majority of buyers of mobile telephone services really are that stupid and the few that aren't have been made to look that way by two decades of dishonest mobile telephone advertising.
So, totally against my long held personal beliefs, we will again consider the merits of using a better perceived mobile network to provide mobile services and see how possible it is to not deceive or misrepresent the actuality of the offering(s).....and there I was thinking we had enough problems to deal with at the moment......
...........where did I leave that brochure from the Sunnybrook retirement home for the mentally challenged?