Friday, October 16. 2009Maybe I'm Losing My Nerve After Almost Six Intense Years...John Linton ...of micro managing a business second by second but I have very real concerns about the immediate future. We had our monthly board meeting yesterday which lasted, as usual, around five or six hours and comprises a review of each aspect of our business with the responsible manager followed by an overall review of our strategies and changes of direction (if there are any). We have been holding monthly board meetings since we began operating as a data service provider and have been holding them in the current format for getting on for two years now. In many ways yesterdays board meeting was a very invigorating affair with most aspects of the business at record levels and a great deal of progress in the operational methodologies we employ together with three exciting new developments. One pleasantly surprising thing (for a company that pays little attention to profit other than to try and ensure we continually make one) was the record profit for the quarter which was higher for the three month period than we had made in the previous six months which, at the time, we were very pleased with. I was surprised because we have gone through some pretty expensive changes to the ways we do a number of things and some of the things we had aimed to do had not worked out as well as we had hoped for.....including the disappointing results in HSPA and the significant decline in new ADSL2 applications - (almost totally offset by the strange increase in ADSL1 applications). Nevertheless revenues and profits for the quarter were at new record highs which is always a good thing when you run a tiny company in viciously competitive market places and allegedly difficult financial times. So why am I feeling less than confident? I can't explain it in credible detail with sufficient analysis to make any sort of sense out of it but some of the more 'real facts' are: 1) I have said for a while that the latest round of annual reports by communications companies (from Telstra down to the dregs) seemed to clearly show that their progress had slowed significantly in the six month period from 1/1/09 to 30/6/09. 2) The ABS survey confirmed this very obvious trend and, if it is to be believed, actually showed a decline in the growth of ADSL for the first time since the technology was introduced. 3) The level of applications we are getting for ADSL2 services that are subsequently rejected due to 'lack of ports' (at least lack of ports for Exetel) continues to increase. 4) There is a noticeable increase in companies advertising 'unbelievable deals' in most media I am aware of. 5) The dial up campaigns by Telstra seem to have resumed with their half price/free/no payments offers that while never turning out to be as true as 'first hearing' would suggest are phrased in ways that seem to be true to the gullible. 6) AAPT's unlimited offer seems to have triggered the copyists with companies like Dodo making such offers now 7) Almost every ISP increasing its downloads if not decreasing prices on almost all of their plans All of these 'facts' are indications of the results of a continuing slow down in new and churn uptake by companies offering ADSL services across the board and as so many companies have made very public forecasts of how much their growth is going to be over the coming months there are going to be, in my opinion, some great difficulties in those companies going anywhere close to the results they are predicting. I could of course be quite wrong and our first quarter's results are certainly pointing in the reverse direction overall - except for ADSL2 take up....and in our particular case our HSPA results are nowhere near what we had planned due to circumstances that only relate to my own stupidity and some actions by our supplier that were very unexpected. I'm not sure what to do about the ADSL services - probably for the first time in six years - but will continue to look at what the future options are and maybe bring forward the anticipated benefits of those future scenarios in to closer term plans and pricing. In terms of HSPA services the situation is even more difficult. Two of the key aspects of what I thought would be the case now have failed to materialise and while neither were 'essential' they would have made a huge difference to us about now. Instead of two major 'pluses' we have an additional two significant 'minuses' which while you can always count on unexpected set backs in business having four 'reverses' in a matter of 6 or so weeks is a little dis-spiriting. Perhaps its time for a radical set of changes to many aspects of our business to deal with the new realities with which it looks like we are being confronted? Nothing seems very clear to me right now which is something I haven't experienced at any time of Exetel's existence. I guess dealing with unexpected negatives is what I get paid for so I better get on with it. Thursday, October 15. 2009Two Years Into The Krudd Imperium......John Linton absolutely nothing has been done, every election 'promise' ignored or broken, the years of fiscal responsibility consigned to huge debt in record time, and the populace more obviously embracing "the world owes me a living/panem et circenses" attitudes to the nanny State........or am I the only person reading this incorrectly: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/28518/53/ Perhaps I'm wrong in thinking that the ABC isn't a commercial entity at all but exists on huge, and ever increasing, amounts of taxpayer money (currently in excess of $A1 billion a year)? So what is this tosser doing declaiming that because there is no cost to him personally, his Labor voting mates who comprise the preponderance of ABC 'employees' or the ABC generally of producing TV and radio programs (courtesy of this publicly funded sinecure) people who use their own and their shareholder's money to actually produce newspapers and TV and radio programs (Rupert Murdoch's media as one of the examples he used) should simply give away their programs - just what does he think is used to produce movies, TV shows, radio broadcasts outside his 'sheltered workshop' which has no responsibility and no accountability and certainly no ability to make the money it needs to provide so many inadequate people with over paid jobs? His stupid statement: "But the old days are gone, he said, and traditional business models with it." (and by the way - what does this Johnny come lately hack know about the old days anyway) ignores the fact that if content is 'given away' then there is no money for a commercial entity to remain producing it.....unlike the ABC that simply adds up a wish list of expenditure and get the tax payer's money to fund it. In this overt hand out Australia put in place by the swinishly lying Krudd and his controllers in the run down end of the Sussex Street.A far more sensible opinion about "free" news is contained in this article from the UK Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article6870224.ece It is all part of the the Labor influences now seen everywhere in the media with the most obvious example being the 15 year old children of, presumably Labor voters, who post on our own and other on line fora about how they should be allowed to steal whatever they want to because firstly they can and secondly because the horrible US movie, CD, DVD and TV production companies make huge profits. It simply confirms that as well as having no morals/ethics they also have an IQ so low and they exist in some sort of cargo cult household where their parents provide all of the housing, food and clothing and 'pocket money' that they fail to understand that it costs huge amounts of money (in the case of the mindless block buster movies they favour up to $US200 million or more) to produce the article they then think it is their right to steal. How do they think such things are 'manufactured' that they can get them without paying the asking price? The utter IQ of zero crass stupidity of this statement: "The public pays for the ABC to deliver distinctive, quality content to (who the f*** does he think he's talking to to need this said)....but what possible relationship does it have to an organisation that isn't endlessly funded by taxpayers????? But there's more to this sinecured 'public servants' pig ignorance of any aspect of normal commercial life: "The latest example is the push by newspaper proprietors, led by This idiot is so terminally stupid (and the statement is actually quite incorrect), something widespread across the ABC employees I have been exposed to via the radio and ABC TV, that he doesn't grasp the Marketing 101 principle of using the money from profitable income streams to pay the start up costs of investing in future income streams. How on Earth does this moron think the 'free' on line news papers were being funded? They were being funded by the PAID for print media they duplicated on the basis, at the start, that very few people looked at the on line versions and therefore the loss of revenue from people who ONLY used the on line versions was miniscule. As that changed over time some income was picked up from on line advertising but not enough to pay the cost of the on line media production and display and more people stopped buying the print versions. I was one of them - I used the on line version of the WSJ for many years but now it has to be paid for I am happy to pay for it. I use the UK on line Times which is still free but if it became chargeable I would be happy to do pay for it - because I value the information those two on line news papers provide and I obviously can't buy a print version of them in Sydney - not to mention the convenience of on line news papers. After two years of Krudd's spiralling out of control giveaways doubtless the author of this arrant nonsense is simply conforming to the Labor voting profile of "why should I pay for anything - the "gummant" can get the rich Liberal voting tax payers to endlessly fund my employment and every other aspect of my life" - no-one really needs to get paid 'outside' money to produce goods and services.
Wednesday, October 14. 2009Is A 'New' Telstra Possible?John Linton My eye was caught by this article earlier this morning: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/28463/127/ which, while it contained nothing factual or specific, among the generalisations there seemed to be the glimmer of a 'message' that Telstra might be considering changing some of its more pernicious practices - I stress that there is a barely discernible glimmer of that inference. Logically, if an 'NBN2' ever did become a reality then there would be a need, in quite a few instances, for a competent wholesale engineering company to provide a variety of services to a level below what some new form of Telstra would buy 'NBN2' services for. While I doubt that an 'NBN2' will ever be built within my life time that wouldn't stop Telstra Wholesale 'reconsidering' its current position if for no other reason than it has lost some significant percentage of its wholesale business to the ISPs who have built their own DSLAMs and to Pipe, NextGen, UEcomm etc who have been providing inter and intra city back hauls and inter State back hauls at an increasing rate. While commercial logic and monopolies don't ever find a meeting point, monopolies under threat of losing some of their monopolistic controls do sometimes have to make changes to their established practices - and I'm not saying that is the case right now - just speculating on what may happen in the future. In theory, Telstra ought to be able to sell any wholesale service at a lower cost than say Optus or AAPT and still make more money than if it sold the same service to its 'retail' operation because it has a vast economy of scale and long written off costs that are not available to those other 'smaller competitors. Of course, it has never done that because it never had to and because it, as a combined entity, liked to take both the wholesale margin and the retail margin on all services by setting the wholesale prices at the Telstra 'retail' buy price PLUS the 'retail' profit margin effectively getting both margins irrespective of whether it sold to a wholesale customer or its retail operation....something only a monopoly can do. But....the current proposed legislation signals a possible end to that situation and you would have to think a sensible attitude for Telstra to now, or at some time in the future, take would be to begin to explore actually developing a true wholesale/retail pricing scenario - at least on a contingency basis. I would think that's unlikely to happen right now but then I also think that it will happen 'eventually' - because it is an unequivocal result of any sort of 'Telstra separation' and therefore Telstra will need to begin to 'experiment' with various options even if its only on a jic scenario. What that may or may not mean I have no idea but I was interested earlier in the year to see the first semi-serious attempt by TW to attempt to meet the IP pricing we were considering at that time - of course they didn't come close enough for serious consideration and prices have continued to drop since we made that decision - but it was the first time in almost fifteen years of buying IP that I have ever seen such a serious attempt at meeting the general market price for a main stream 'product'. As they now own their own cable their price should have been much lower than a wholesaled SX price at that time (March 2009) but true to their track record they never can seem to believe that an identical service sold through them isn't worthy of a significant price premium. However - as the "S" word becomes closer to reality maybe that will change? Time always only moves on and even monopolies have to eventually make changes to their long cherished policies in the face of very real changes in circumstances. One of those changes, and we are talking over the coming decade if at all, is that Telstra Wholesale's largest customers (Optus and AAPT and possibly iPrimus) will reduce their spending with TW if any part of the 'NBN2' is actually completed and that companies like TPG and iinet will continue to move services away from TW and onto either their own networks or on to the mobile networks of Optus and, perhaps, Vodafone. Doubtless UEcomm, Pipe, Nextgen and whoever is contracted to build out the 'NBN2' will continue to take away TW's back haul business (and also Telstra Retail's back haul business) and what remains of TW's and TR's IP business may well melt away like snow in the summer if SX continues to protect its own IP business with more price reductions over the course of 2010. There is absolutely no reason why TW couldn't sell small companies like Exetel IP, HSPA, ADSL2 and Fibre services at the same or lower prices than the providers we currently use and make more profit than our current providers do......if they wanted to. They never have wanted to for all the reasons that are available to monopolies. Perhaps that will change over the coming years? I can see a lot of advantages for all sorts of people (including Telstra) if Telstra actually decided to run a true wholesale business at true wholesale profits - either in its current form or as a 'separated' entity....but then I'm biased.
Tuesday, October 13. 2009Email Is Dead - Long Live Twitter/Google Wave?John Linton I have no idea of Ms Vescellaro's credentials and disagree with much of what she says in this: but, as usual I get impressed with quoted 'statistics' even when, as in this case it would have been impossible to actually collect them. I would also have to discount her major premise: "But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Doubtless some, perhaps a great many, people used to "log on and off" to their email - no-one in business ever did that who had a halfway communications dependent job and last time I looked email was a business communications method that has been taken up by some types of 'social' users - but not very many I wouldn't have thought. Personally my email is never logged off and, apart from when I am asleep or socially engaged any email I wish to reply to averages less than ten minutes with 80% of received email replied to within less than 5 minutes. I am not an exception (in business) where the principal people with whom I communicate reply to my emails within similar time frames except for the more junior employees of Exetel's major suppliers who regard Exetel as not very important. So I assume she is really referring to the mobile phone/SMS 'generation' to whom nothing is too trivial to communicate in their vacuous and boring lives - a touch harsh but in dealing with sweeping generalisations you get a lot of license. Perhaps the thrust of the article is correct in that the constant development of "instant" messaging shows no sign of declining and today's mobile telephone and presumably mobile computer user becomes addicted to a stream of mundanity that properly reflects the pointlessness of their lives. However her research is poorly based and even her generalisations are historically way out. Email didn't replace the letter as she claims - the telephone did - which has all of the speed of the new technologies she is lauding together with the additional benefit of 'instant' clarification of misunderstandings. For the record the posted letter was only replaced by the telephone because of the illiteracy of the general user of written communications - not because it "took days" for the letter to reach its destination it didn't. A kinder person than me would probably say the multiple daily postal deliveries were rendered pointless once the telephone allowed 'instant' replies to the sender of any letter therefore not needing a 'same day' service for replies. While I never personally knew the pre-WW2 frequency of early morning post, mid morning post, afternoon post and evening post delivery schedules that extended from the late Victorian era to 1940 (even in rural England). I was born and had part of a childhood in a twice daily postal delivery system which seemed more than sufficient but in any event had indeed begun to be replaced by the 'just thought I'd call to have a chat' telephone service. Sure - you can't send photographs over the telephone but then a better educated world still retained the vestiges of enough English language skills to allow vivid descriptions of events and people that needed describing without the aid of pictures. I am not belittling the current IM services which drive the growth of mobile telephony expenditure that benefits at least those companies who provide such services and contribute to passing on information to more locations of people at any time than ever before in the history of humanity - just correcting the writers mis-assumptions which lead to her incorrect conclusions. There may even be some sort of social or personal benefit in the new IM technologies and it may be come to be seen that they in fact do have a beneficial place in human societies....but I don't think that is by any means certain. IM wouldn't be the first 'universally used' "product" that has more negative effects on individuals and societies than was initially thought when the products were 'welcomed' in to general use (think - tobacco, alcohol, amphetamines and opiates just to quote the most obvious). Personally, I think that IM as an adjunct to RPG and chat sites has increased the capacity of technology to destroy the current generation of Australian children more completely than the Black Death destroyed Western Europe in the mid 14th century - but with less chance of recovery. Monday, October 12. 2009Broadband Pricing Seems To Be Increasing.........John Linton ......alternatively I need a refresher course in both reading comprehension and simple arithmetic. I spent some time over the weekend re-looking at the ADSL2 plans and going through a fairly detailed analysis of the various offerings provided by a number of ISPs with whom I think Exetel 'competes'. It is a laborious and boring thing to do on a weekend and because of that it takes more time than it should and is prone to error because of the difficulty in so many cases of interpreting the 'qualifications' to what appears to be said. However, if you apply yourself long enough to any task, and check the results sensibly enough more than once you will almost always produce a result. I obviously failed in one of those aspects of addressing this particular task as I didn't end up with anything usable and will have to start the whole process again today....not a great thought with which to start the week. I had expected, for no rational reason other than two years of statements in the media and hype from Pipe, that prices of ADSL services would have fallen by now from those ISPs who had helped Pipe through their financial difficulties and in return got 'incredibly advantageous preferential pricing' - as has so often been stated in the communications media I read most days of the week. If this has in fact happened then I see no sign of it at all anywhere. Unless my recent two analyses deceive me (and that may well be the case) the only thing I can see is that, if anything, the prices have increased slightly across at least four of those ISP's offerings - which can't be right - can it? Admittedly the 'included downloads' have increased. The other thing I noticed was the re-emphasis on "off peak" time with the dishonest depiction of "included downloads" being scummily depicted as a single figure when in fact at least half, or in the case of TPG up to 70%, actually being in an "off peak" period of varying duration and starting time....and of course there was the unlimited 12 hour period offered by AAPT with its amazing start time of 8 pm (which in all the years I have been associated with providing internet services is the START of absolute "peak time". I initially had trouble with working out why that would be done until I thought about how AAPT uses their owned network and that peak time for them probably ends before 8 pm so it makes eminent sense to use their owned network usage advantage against companies that are essentially data only service providers. So, having taken for granted that Exetel has enjoyed a marketing advantage in using the off peak period to benefit end users since March 2004 that is either no longer the case or of dubious value. Ignoring my deficient 'competitive analysis' it seems that the 'off peak' scenario needs a radical overhaul and some 'back to the future' thinking. I was very slow to pick up the AAPT rationale although Exetel has, since June 2004, used the reverse of that rationale to price our business plan offerings (our residential users required much more bandwidth in the evenings which left the business 8 - 5 period as basically unused for many years) thus making the data used in that period effectively 'free'. We have been offered/asked to be offered new pricing from the 5 providers we have some reasonable contacts with for new IP pricing based on different periods of the day and also just plain lower pricing for IP bandwidth to cater for the growth above the 3.3 gb of "contracted" IP bandwidth which together with the Akamai, Pipe and PeerApp contributions gives us a 4.8 gb "base" which we increment each month depending on growth. Our usual pattern of buying is to contract for the current level of bandwidth plus the estimated next three months growth on an annual basis and then buy additional bandwidth each month from a different provider to allow us to take advantage of the lower rates that occur every quarter that we have been in business. Steve is also working out whether we can expand the PeerApp boxes (or NetApp or some other provider) to provide for a more general caching solution than the one we used for P2P traffic for some 18 months before switching it off. The intention was to increase the time and capability of the off peak period but I can't see how that is now possible to even match the AAPT offering let alone do it better.....it appears to me that is a truly innovative offering with great appeal to most families and to many other types of user. It's only weakness is, of course, its cost and its 'peak period' configuration but that still doesn't give a lot to work with - at least as far as I can work out at the moment. I was very reluctant to 'give up' the marketing advantage of a 12 hour free download period and would still favour a return to that but the AAPT offering is a stand out differentiator and the low 'peak' download inclusion may well prevent the wrong sort of customers from taking it up - another clever idea if that's what it is and how it works out. If it didn't go against the very core of why Exetel is in business I would actually consider just copying it at a lower monthly price - maybe I can justify it based on all the ideas AAPT have 'copied from Exetel over the years? Now I come to think of it that may well be the way to go - it is genuinely innovative and has brought the first truly fresh concept to the market in .....I can't remember when. It would not be innovative for Exetel (just copying someone else isn't something I ever thought we would do) but it is hard/impossible to see how we can come up with anything better.....and they have pitched the price too high...as such a company would always have to. It would be ironic to copy a providers concepts for once having watched our providers pick up so many of the ideas that Exetel brought to the market. (one of the advantages of writing a daily blog based on what is on your mind at the time of writing is that it sometimes 'crystalises' your thinking in strange and different ways).
Sunday, October 11. 2009Australia - Not The Pleasant Place I Have Always Liked So MuchJohn Linton I don't know whether it the continued outrageous lying by Krudd and co or the chaotic and stupid performance by the Federal opposition or the ludicrous attitudes of so many people whose views are impossible to avoid in the visual, sound and print media or just the actions of the a**holes on the roads or even the arrogant piece of sh** who parked in my car space on Friday and when 'found' had the unmitigated gall to say "I'll only be another ten minutes" and then not move the car for another hour. Perhaps its all those ethically challenged and morally bankrupt people who publish their views that stealing other people's property is absolutely their right and AFACT etc are sooooo wrong in attempting to protect their client's property. It might be simply that I've spent almost 4 weeks out of Australia with very different and very pleasant people - but I am reaching the very strong view that I really dislike so many people who proclaim themselves to be Australians and I dislike their actions even more. I understand that it is a 'universal truism' that as you get old you see the past with rose coloured glasses and see current circumstances as being inferior and inimical to the past experiences and circumstances - I think (though I may well be wrong) that I am relatively intelligent, well read and well educated so I am aware of most 'conventional wisdom' and then some real understanding of most commonly experienced changes of perspectives as a human being grows in age and experience and understanding (in some people's cases). So it seems to me that I am not completely incorrect in my view that Australia has slowly deteriorated from the country I came to as a lonely 17 year old almost 50 years ago. I have no doubt that my views are irrelevant and most people would hotly dispute them but, to me, they are factually and empirically based and, again to me, are now being played out in almost every aspect of life in this country. However what is beginning to really depress me (in general not specific terms) is the belief that this isn't a simple incorrect judgment at a point in one person's personal life but it's actually just a point along a steepening curve of decline across the whole spectra of Australian society. It isn't reversible in my opinion because we have ceased being any form of democracy (the first basis of which is the fitness for office of any candidate and then the accountability for their actions once in office) across the mess that is Australia's triple level of wasteful government. As Ros Pritchard's script writer gave her the words to say that describes 'democracy' today: "Have I become like every other politician - a duplicitous tosser." That is the problem. I live in A State where local councils are so blatantly corrupt that they are run by bribes to inadequate people who are part of the 'two party system' of branch stacking and back handers putting inadequate people in 'power' whose only objectives are to further their own interests and to make as much money from their "office" as possible as quickly as possible. I also live in a State where the venal Labor party has destroyed every aspect of infrastructure and every aspect of service provision by a candidate selection process that simply recycles union hacks and fellow travelers who have NO capability or capacity whatsoever, let alone the education or intellect, to "manage" the ministry they are appointed to - the result for ANY person who lives in NSW is that during the greatest economic growth period Australia has ever seen every aspect of the State in which we live declined sharply.....and what compounded that obvious management fiasco was that somehow the electorate of this State re-elected the lying, criminal buffoons who were making all aspects of their lives more miserable year by year.....presumably because there was no better alternative. I, personally, don't think that the Labor party is the only reason the country is declining in appeal to me - the Liberal and National parties and the dummies who think that fragmenting a two party system is going to help in any way semi-equally contribute to the process - they just equally serve as examples of why Australia is not the great place to live it once was and as the old concept of democracy further atrophies it will become even less appealing than it is today. I'm not a conspiracy theorist (perhaps I don't have enough imagination) but I have read enough 'real' history to understand that nothing is forever in any society comprised of 'evolutionary' based entities. All human societies that have ever existed have reached a peak and then declined at some rate from that peak - often precipitously - but almost always because of the decline in standards of their governors/government. My, you may well think jaundiced, view is that Australia reached its peak some 30 years ago and now, having consigned every public decision making position to a succession of duplicitous tossers (how illustrative was it to appoint a union drone who didn't finish high school as Minister Of Defence?) we are, jointly, suffering from the consequences of having 30 or so years of decisions made by people whose only decision making criterion is "how do I personally get a benefit from this". With 2,000 duplicitous tossers making every decision that affects all Australian societies for decades past and decades to come and an apathetic electorate that has no choice (both sides of politics blatantly talk about getting in to power or remaining in power as their only objectives - not a skerrick of benefiting Australia and Australians enters into a single sentence from their duplicitous lips) God knows what shape this country, this State and this suburb will be in over the coming ten years. I see no prospect of any change to the steepening decline - every aspect of it is rotten to the core - the ever dumber electorate treats political parties in the same way they treat football teams but without any level of knowledge. Saturday, October 10. 2009Exetel's Current Business Plan.....John Linton ........a bit like the (later interpretations) of the mythical "curate's egg" for the first three months of this financial year. We will complete the review of Exetel's business plan next week which is something we do at this time each year just to check the 'sanity' of the assumptions we made when we embarked on the new financial year. In terms of the various services we offer the assumptions appear to be pretty much on track except for the continuing anomaly of ADSL1 sales continuing to exceed ADSL2 sales for the past 6 or so weeks.The October 1st plan price changes did boost ADSL2 sales, particularly the SSS based plans but it also, strangely boosted ADSL1 sales although the changes to those plans were extremely minor. As we have in past periods relied quite a lot on ADSL2 growth (though not as much recently as other parts of our business become much stronger) the current trend is a little disturbing and, so far defies at least my ability to reach some sort of understanding of why it's happening. I have looked at the figures in all the usual ways I know how to do but I can find no reason, let alone reason, why there should be a slow down in ADSL2 growth. I have little doubt that the APPT 'unlimited' 12 hour offer has probably played a part and maybe that is a bigger part than I ascribe to it but I would also expect that to be shown in the 'churn away' figures which it isn't - though because of the uncertainty of transfer in both actuality and reporting I can't rely on the figures I have seen. September was a record month for business SHDSL and Ethernet sales and our 'investment' in university graduate trainees and the 'unique' mentoring system we continue to perfect to rapidly train and make the stream of new hires effective has worked really well so far. Six of the first nine trainees have successfully passed their probation period (by making ten sales each in their first four months with Exetel) and, while we are a little behind our hiring targets due to the time of year, we have been able to make a very substantial difference to both our sales numbers and our geographic coverage and also, based on the feedback from the accounts we have won, are beginning to shake up other companies who have allowed complacency to creep in to both their account retention processes and their rip off pricing. Based on the escalating stream of absurd lies being told about Exetel to prospective customers by several competitors (including two of the very largest business data services providers in Australia) our minor successes to date are causing an unexpected amount of pain. Goodness knows what they will say if we actually reach our planned business targets over the coming months. The other quite rapidly escalating growth has been in VOIP with a slightly higher percentage of our broad band customers using our VoIP service every month and a slightly higher average revenue per user each month. We are also seeing an increase in business VoIP usage and more business customers approaching us to install VoIP solutions which then also require an Ethernet or SHDSL service rather than the other way round. Our internal experiences with developing a very sophisticated VoIP service for ourselves that has 60 users in two different countries and 7 locations has given us a very solid 'body' of practical experience in 'delivering highly reliable and highly innovative VoIP solutions that not only save significant amounts of money in terms of call and line costs but provide functionality that is impossible to be provided over 'conventional' PABX systems. Our other services continue to grow pretty much along the lines in the business plan so the only 'bad' parts of the first three months are the ULL based ADSL2 Naked and ADSL2 including telephone service offerings which are performing below planned targets. I will re-look at the ULL ADSL plans over the next couple of days in more detail than I have done over the past week but I need to find somewhere to start. I think the real problem may well be that Exetel has grown beyond one person's ability to devote enough time to the overall management and design of the sales processes and the detail of the pricing and 'product presentation' and the reality has become that simply not enough thinking time and analysis is being devoted to each of the different services as was possible in the past when there was only 2 or 3 different services and every nuanced detail was constantly examined. If that actually proves to be the case it will take longer to address than I think we need to do and Exetel may well need to move towards becoming a much more boringly conventional company.
Friday, October 9. 2009Was There Ever A Financial Crisis In Australia?........John Linton ......or anywhere else for that matter other than a few dodgy US and British banks getting their long overdue comeuppances and the dinosaurs of the US and European car industries finally facing the reality that they made poor quality vehicles of an absurd body weight and size that no-one could afford to run or even wanted? About this time last year when we were reviewing Exetel's first quarter's results and following the ongoing downwards movement in share prices we took the first tentative steps towards taking a more cautious approach to what was then being talked about as the "Global Financial Crisis" then quickly shortened to 'GFC' as it became used in virtually every statement made by a Labor politician particularly Krudd and Whine who proceeded to use it as excuse to dump $A40 billion of borrowed money into the hands of every individual in Australia (and a fair number in other countries) to ensure that unemployment didn't reach their direly predicted numbers. As the months rolled by the unemployment figures didn't rise very much except in the banking industry which had taken the Australian people and business for a ride for the previous decade while amassing gigantic profits and while the term 'GFC' soon became worn out by extreme over use nothing happened very much around the world other than the various governments panicked their citizens into slightly different views of their personal futures. Despite all the money borrowed to be dumped without any thought in to various hand out programs and the associated "we'll all be rooned" comments from the people not in a position to dump that borrowed money nothing else happened. There was still plenty of money for Krudd and co to jet around the world "addressing the 'GFC'" and there was still plenty of borrowed money for rich Western countries to wage war against the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq and continue to buy expensive military toys to do that with. The price of crude oil and therefore pump petrol fell a lot, the value of the $A began a long progressive rise and various economists pronounced that not only were Australians not being affected by any sort of financial crisis but were actually on average better off by figures ranging from $A5,000 to $A11,200 per year. Today I read this: http://www.smh.com.au/business/a-soars-against-pound-20091008-gp0l.html which confirmed that shares were at a 52 week or greater highs around the world (including bank stocks in Australia) and that the $A was tracking to 25 year highs against the pound and even likely to approach parity with the $US for the first time since the $A was floated. Even I, usually the most cautious of investors, sold all our family superannuation fund owned shares as they had made a handsome 85% profit since I began purchasing shares earlier in the year and why they may well continue to rise I can think of other investments that may actually give a better return. So for almost twelve months we have been operating the Exetel business quite cautiously but have seen no change to the rate of growth, in overall financial or customer terms, over the past twelve months as we have seen in any other twelve month period in Exetel's history - in profit terms (which we pay little heed to) we have made a little more profit in that period than we did in the preceding twelve months. The changes to the ADSL pricing and plans made at the beginning of November have increased the new application rate by around 25% and we had a record application day twice in the first few days of this month in terms of new broadband application days - strangely that growth was delivered by ADSL1 not ADSL2. So perhaps we can become a little more adventurous than we have been over the past twelve months - at least in some ways. The overall uncertainty in our particular marketplaces (data communications) caused by the continuing nonsense of the 'NBN2' and the Labor government's threats to break up Telstra via legislation have made it much harder for a tiny company like Exetel to work out any sort of sensible future medium term strategy and our previous belief that we could base that on HSPA has been destroyed by factors beyond our control (and partly on my stupidity). Because of my personal, and Exetel's collective uncertainty about the current ADSL2 market there is no 'room' to make any 'bold' moves in ADSL or in ADSL1. So we are now more uncertain and hesitant due to the specific uncertainties in our 'industry' than we ever were in the phony "GFC" period. There has to be a more productive way to spend the remaining time left than living with the daily chaos of a Labor government and an incompetent opposition - I must move to a democracy if any such thing exists in today's world.
Thursday, October 8. 2009
I Remain Unable To Comprehend Mobile ... Posted by John Linton
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Comments (15) Trackbacks (0) I Remain Unable To Comprehend Mobile Pricing In AustraliaJohn 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? Wednesday, October 7. 2009Truth And ISP's Public Statements........John Linton .......two completely different things that bear no relationship to each other. I don't know whether its the result of month of talking only to real people while on holidays in rural England or the jaundiced eye with which I have had to look at so many situations in the week or so I have been back in Australia but the award for most lies in a single brief newspaper article must go to Internode's spokesmen in this particular article (assuming they were reported correctly): Now the head line of the article describes the actuality correctly -"bigger data allowances" - but this is the final result of months/years of hype about the 'new' Pipe cable signaling the era of lower ADSL plan prices. Fair enough - there was never any chance of lower ADSL plan prices from ISPs such as Internode and iinet (let alone Telstra or Optus) but for almost two years that has been the claims by at least iinet and Internode. It doesn't really matter because, of course, the assumption is that no-one who reads statements from such people ever remember what they previously said.
"Internode spokesperson John Harris told PC Authority Why not? It is very obviously a "cost cutting exercise". Why has it been trumpeted for two years as a way of obtaining cheaper international IP transit if it isn't a cost cutting exercise? Why do it if it doesn't provide cost benefits? Why the attempt to disguise the fact that Internode (and iinet et alia) have constantly been saying in the press for two years that it will "massively reduce costs of IP" and will result in lower prices to the end user? The there's another equally silly statement: "Internode's and: "Michael You just have to laugh out loud at this total misrepresentation of the truth. How is increasing someone's quota by up to 20 gigabytes a month delivering them any better value? The simple answer is that - it doesn't deliver better value in any way......unless you think that on this particular day everyone of Internode's and iinet's customers suddenly found a need to download what for the majority of them would be more than double what they downloaded previously it is not delivering value it is simply a totally cynical way of saying : "hey, we just reduced our operating costs by millions of dollars a year but you get none of the benefits of that" Or you could look at it another way if you wanted to take the view that most ADSL users want to increase their internet usage by more than double (or at least by 20 gigabytes a month as claimed by Internode). Exetel, a much smaller company than either iinet or Internode of course, now pays around 30 cents a gigabyte for international IP traffic and expects that to fall to less than 25 cents per gigabyte by Christmas. If Internode was genuine in passing on the wind fall cost savings it claims it has just made it would simply reduce its plan costs to provide downloads at a 100% mark up on its new, claimed much lower, IP costs - which in the case of its current "30 gb plans" would be reduction of a minimum of $A5.00 a month. The 'justification' not to expressed as: "And No sh** - but it very much does decrease your IP costs so what relevance does introducing other costs have on the issues? (Presumably those other costs continue to fall as greater economies of scale are reached?). None whatsoever unless you are trying to hide the fact that you are desperate to take a windfall cost gain for reasons undisclosed. There is NO benefit from increasing the included download in a plan by a large amount unless there is a range of plans that allows a user to DOWNgrade to a lower priced plan for the same amount of data he/she actually used in a month. There is no problem at all in a commercial company improving its monthly/yearly profit by buying from its suppliers at lower prices. Trying to explain why the promised customer lower plan prices haven't happened by lying flim flam isn't an appropriate thing to do. So the actions of Internode and iinet will make this claim by Pipe a nonsense: "PIPE International chairman Bevan Slattery hailed the new cable as sufficient motivation to cut ISP costs throughout Australia," Nothing to see here in terms of lower ADSL pricing.....perhaps the reason is........ that SX IP bandwidth is already offered at a lower price than the vaunted for years Pipe price?
Tuesday, October 6. 2009Post Democracy Politicians Do Exact A Bigger Cost Than You ThinkJohn Linton I have said that one of my main concerns about the ridiculous "NBN2' (and the NBN1 before it) is that it has killed off investment in current and new communications infrastructures. This has very definitely affected Exetel in that our two major ADSL2 carriers (Optus and AAPT) continue to run out of ports in their current DSLAMs and has brought to a screeching halt their investment in new DSLAMs - quite understandably but nevertheless it is very annoying to receive a growing number of ADSL2 applications that are rejected because of no capacity at the growing number of exchanges. However it could be worse, and for some categories of small ISPs it undoubtedly is as evidenced in this brief article: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/28207/127/1/1/ Now you may well make the case that these sorts of small companies only exist because of gigantic, and largely misguided, previous Federal Government subsidies via HIBIS and TBG but nevertheless Federal Governments have encouraged these companies to start up businesses to supply services in regional and rural Australia with some expectation that they would last longer than the initial handout - not be wiped out at a stroke of the pen making some arbitrary decision to use a different government funded hand out to use a different technology. I am not any sort of fan of government handouts to create false 'economies' in the supply of any goods or services and I regard the billion or so dollars expended on these rural support schemes as among the worst ever dreamed up by an ACT bureaucracy. However the situation now becomes an even bigger subsidy to wipe out the previous subsidies except this subsidy will be in the hands of either a Labor bureaucracy or a Federal Government/Telstra kluge which makes it an even worse waste of money than previously. However it does starkly exemplify the hiatus in investment across a wide spectrum of activity in providing data services generally and to rural/regional Australia in particular. For those of you who remember Krudd's initial lies about the NBN1, and apparently the majority of the Australian electorate has the memory capacity of a mentally retarded guppy suffering from Alzheimer's, you would remember that the lying swine promised that NBN1 should have already been delivered with the first users activated by December 2008! However, it appears that no-one remembers that and the collective idiocy that comprises the Australian electorate has 'moved on' and is now, or at least 70% of those demented sheep, are now content that a mythical Australia wide network (yet to be costed or even roughly described) will be available some time/many years in the future. OK - lying politicians making every minute of their working day a personal crusade to try and ensure their snout firmly remains in the public trough for as long as possible is all that an Australian electorate deserves in this post-democracy era in which we now live so there is nothing that can be done. I wonder whether these same sheep who give Krudd a 70% approval rating will continue to do so as the NBN2 continually drifts in to an ever further away future and the ports for ADSL2 run out in all but Telstra exchanges and all of the small/tiny ISPs in rural and regional Australia cease operating? Of course no Labor politician gives a damn about rural Australia (they are never going to win a seat there) and the crazier elements of the National and Liberal parties (read Wilson Tuckey and Barnaby Joyce) are going to ensure that there is no cohesive and coherent voicing of reasoned opposition to the Krudd version of 21st century National Socialism. So, the current 'NBN2' situation is slowly crippling small ISPs across the country and that situation will only get worse. Exetel is already being affected by at least one of our ADSL2 suppliers 'rationing' ADSL2 ports by reserving ports for its retail operations in a more and more obvious way which is very costly to Exetel (and we assume other small ISPs like us) - we go to all the expense of generating an application which is rejected but is subsequently fulfilled by the retail operation of the carrier - this is not going to produce a positive result for Exetel. The cited article shows how one segment of the ISP industry will be effectively wiped out before the metaphorical 'spade hits the top soil' to begin the delivery of the 'NBN2' illusion. If you vote in self serving lying swine to 'run the country' (assuming that you actually believe that a bunch of uneducated union hacks and fellow travelers even have the intellectual capacity to spell "democracy") then the results are totally predictable - the destruction, once again, of all of the good things that made Australia such a pleasant place to live.
Monday, October 5. 2009Does A Business Blog Provide Any Value To Anyone?John Linton A combination of two 'events' caused me to think about the value of blogs generally and this one particularly. The events were a comment in an email I received yesterday that I gave away too much information about Exetel in this blog that would benefit 'competitors' to the detriment of Exetel (based on something we had been discussing) and the fact that this is my 800th consecutive daily musing/rant - which is far longer than the original year I had intended to write for to win the bet I made when I was first introduced to the value of a 'CEO' writing a daily blog about the business he is involved in. Over that time I have read a number of articles (in English, US, Canadian and German publications) on the pros and cons of writing a regular business blog and the overwhelming view has been that it is a good idea but that the demands of doing so are beyond the abilities and time available to any senior business executive and that none of the authors of the various articles could find examples of any senior executive of any reasonable sized company who had actually written a blog at all. Their conclusions were that the logistics/time/travel constraints were too great for any senior executive to write a regular blog at a greater frequency than fortnightly and they could find no actual examples of that in the research they did in writing their articles. I always find such articles surprising because the reason I started writing a blog was the analysis and recommendations published in two US academic journals which both, in very different ways, made a very strong argument for the overall value to a business of a 'CEO' sharing his business and other thoughts on a regular basis via a blog. Both articles made the point that the more frequent the blog entries were made the greater overall value to the company and both articles made the point that a daily blog would be the most beneficial and listed their reasons for reaching that conclusion. I never printed those articles and via mishaps to the notebooks and data sticks I have used over the past two years I no longer have the references to them. What I do have is over two years of personal experience of writing a daily blog and those experiences have emphatically proven what those two articles stated without a shadow of a doubt. In pure commercial terms Exetel is better off by over $A1,000,000 EACH YEAR in terms of better pricing we have obtained from or via suppliers who read this blog. We have also added products and services to what we offer that we would never have done without the direct contacts we have received from people who have read something I wrote and then got in touch with us. In pure dollar terms this particular blog has repaid the time it takes to write it at a rate of approximately $A2,500 per hour. And that is just using actual offers that can be discretely and pretty exactly valued. There is no real way of quantifying the value of the, literally thousands, of other suggestions and observations that have been made over the past 2+ years but over 500 individuals have written to me saying they signed up for an Exetel service (either for themselves or their employer) because they read something that impressed them in the blog. Similarly it has been a very useful way of communicating with Exetel customers about general aspects of Exetel's business and the data communications marketplaces generally. Over 10,000 individual customers have sent me comments and/or suggestions over the time the blog has been published. So I think I am in a sensible position to state, based on real 'evidence' that a business blog very definitely benefits a business - I don't believe there is a shadow of a doubt about that statement. The question then only becomes how much effort does it take to write a blog each day - to that question there can be no answer because, of course, it totally depends on the individual that sets out to do it. My own experiences are that it takes an average of 30 - 40 minutes each day to think up a 'topic' and then write 800 - 1,000 words on that topic. I do it, usually, first thing in the morning after reading the data communications media from the US, UK and Australia which almost always generates a 'topic' or at least a rant. I do this at home over a cup of something before leaving for the office and when I'm away I do it in the late afternoons because of time differences and the effect of jet lag in the mornings. While it can be regarded as a discipline it isn't really - it just uses time that would otherwise be 'wasted'. I don't know how much longer I will write a daily blog because I am conscious that there is only a limited amount of things one person has to share in terms of business and its associated vagaries. I have managed to date by making no pretensions about any value or insight my ramblings might provide but just to adhere to the title of the blog - my thoughts at any given time about Exetel and what is involved in keeping a small business 'alive'. Sunday, October 4. 2009No Place For Small Companies In Today's Give Away MarketsJohn Linton
I sent a 'fuller' explanation that effectively said that the marketplaces in which we had planned to operate had changed over the time we had been trying to source the device and that the current 'climate' in the residential data market was going to become increasingly difficult over the coming twelve months with more and more people attempting to use HSPA revenues to attempt to keep their sagging wire line revenues from becoming too much of a problem to their growth objectives. We believed that this, together with the uncertainties of the Labor Governments actual actions was not a time to be gambling with large expenditures on untried hardware. We exchanged emails on the HSPA market generally and his company's plans for various new hardware devices and I explained my thoughts on how HSPA offerings had changed and my views on how they would change over the coming months especially in late November of this year. My view is that I no longer believed that Exetel could sell the volumes of HSPA servces we had planned and therefore we couldn't risk any further significant investments in 'novel' HSPA hardware as we had done with the very low cost long distance aerial. My other view is simply that a tiny company like Exetel cannot compete in any discount residential market like HSPA and has therefore had to change its previous plans to accept the realities of the current situation. I suppose our poor planning was based on an assumption that HSPA would follow the ADSL 'model' in terms of customer appeal but its clear that the same scummy tactics used to sell mobile telephones are predominantly the way that HSPA is being offered by the less ethical of the HSPA providers. If you have any doubts about the new lows in ethical marketing (though that is probably an oxymoron) that are being reached a glance at page 17 of today's Sydney Sun-Herald will dispel such a view. Some samples: "Consumers are making up to 350 complaints a day to the TIO about the high cost of owning new generation phones for what is known as "bill shock" "Sam had a $49.00 capped plan and his first two bills were for $7,102 and $3766 respectively" "Mrs C used global roaming while in India for 3 months, she checked her internet usage regularly as advised by her provider but the charges weren't updated - after 3 months she had run up a bill of $4,500." "My daughter said she just used her phone to update her entry on Facebook on the way home but here I have a bill for $700." It seems we have returned to the bad old days of 2002 when people on Telstra's then brand new ADSL service with its super low included download allowances and its gigantic excess charges were in the headlines for getting multi-thousand dollar monthly ADSL bills. (Annette reminded me when she pointed out that article that we had got a thousand dollar plus bill in those days when we used Telstra's ADSL because of our children's downloads). But it's not going to go away and the reality is it's going to get worse as the fight to retain revenues becomes harder. My view is that the truly scummy operatives in the market, fully supported by the carrirs wholeslae account managers will destroy any semblance of 'ethical' marketing of HSPA services. There appears to be no place for a tiny company like Exxetel in this scenario. Although the first three months of this financial year (subject to seeing the final profit calculations for September) have been on target for Exetel, and in several areas well above each of the monthly targets we set back in June, I feel some very 'chill winds' blowing that make me think that our business plans need to be reviewed very carefully and revised downwards in terms of growth targets in several areas - not just in HSPA projections. In making that statement I'm not being pointlessly pessimistic I am merely looking at the facts as I can find them and then try to make intelligent decisions based on what seems to be the case. It seems to me that there is no/little place for a tiny/small company in residential data markets any more - the advantages of in depth knowledge and therefore the skills to make things happen better than the larger companies have reached the end of the road and are being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of marketing give aways and other money based methodologies. No big deal - that has always been the way of commerce in 'mass markets'. Our issue is to 'protect' what we have worked so hard to develop over the past few years and find a way past the problems that change always creates. Again, nothing new in having to do that - just sometimes you would like a less complex scenario to deal with. The person I was corresponding with this morning also advised me to stop writing this blog.....he said it gave too much information to people who shouldn't have the benefit of it. Saturday, October 3. 2009Oh Dear...Technology And Law Suits........John Linton ....they simply don't go together. I had a really good laugh earlier this morning when I read this: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157336,revealed-iinets-film-copyright-defence.aspx which just goes to show how impossible it is for communications technology to be explained to lawyers and then what a gross stupidity it becomes for lawyers to try and explain their own poor understanding to judges which results in the fiasco at the end of weeks/months of meaningless explanations of someone (the judge) basing a long statement of 'judgment' based on three levels of progressively wilder incomprehension. The gigantic egos and self intellectual belief of everyone involved certainly doesn't help but as the law suits between Telstra, Optus et alia and the ACCC have so clearly demonstrated over the years - the only thing you can believe is that SCs and judges are absolutely unable to grasp the simplest actual realities of the communications services currently supplied in Australia. Now, I know that the article I have cited is simply a poorly selected precis of a much longer document but you can get a pretty fair idea of the overall thrust of the defence in cluding the ludicrous 'offence' of attacking the process used to obtain the evidence as the film companies being "the primary infringer": Perth ISP iiNet will throw the spotlight on the film industry, accusing Goodness knows how either gullible or stupid the SC advising iinet must be if he/she truly thinks that red herring will 'float' but undoubtedly it will take a lot of time and the lawyers on both sides will earn a great deal of money discussing the merits of the processes used by AFACT to gather incontrovertible evidence of copyright infringement. To even suggest the point is worthy of consideration demonstrates two things blindingly clearly - that the lawyers working for iinet have no idea of what they are doing and how tissue thin the defence that iinet have cobbled together actually is. As you read further you realise that iinet's whole defence, as it was always going to be, is based on the same tissue thin nonsense where it isn't based on outright lies. Take this claim: "iiNet argued it would need "substantial" and costly IT systems to Heavens to Betsy Paw - haven't iinet ever heard of computers and scripting"The ISP said it will also argue that wading through every infringement "The ISP said it will also argue that wading through every infringement As you read each silly 'defence' it just gets worse and worse and you really begin to wonder if an SC was involved in constructing this defence at all as each successive statement is more ridiculously stupid than the previous one. I particularly liked this gross idiocy: "The ISP said that the user could be "be the partner, child, flat-mate, Apparently iinet are claiming that their own contract signed by the applicant which includes specific references to illegal use of the service is somehow not binding on the applicant? How patently ridiculous is this claim which is equally patently spurious? How such a piece of nonsense could be included yet again demonstrates how desperate iinet is and how equally desperate their advisers are - "m'lud it was a passing pirate that stole my client's service to do the dastardly deed" - it beggars the imagination.
"If iiNet were to implement a regime of this type, it would lose customers to other ISPs such as Telstra and Optus" Did someone with any sense at all decide to make this claim? "M'lud, my client is innocent of theft because other companies allow their customers to steal" So - probably the article's 'distillation' of the full defence in to a few sentences didn't do it justice but I have to say that if the quoted excerpts actually do represent the key defence 'planks' then iinet are truly stuffed. That opinion is based on what appears to be iinet's actual defence which is based on one lie and one unconscionable belief: 1) ...its to expensive to on forward infringement notices - the simple fact is that copyright infringement notices can be sent or a tiny fraction of a cent with no involvement by a 'human being' at any stage of the process. 2) ...we would lose money if we took any steps to prevent our customers from breaching copyright - I guess that sums up iinet's ethics but it seems to be as much use as a defence as the gang rapist convicted in a Sydney court three years ago whose defence was "She was begging for it and I wasn't first".....my memory fails me but I think he got 28 years jail. My own, limited, experience in technology and the law is that 'anything can happen' as none of the protagonists really understands even the basics well enough for a judge to understand on what points of law he should rule. If I was a betting man - I would put my money on iinet losing comprehensively on every count. Friday, October 2. 2009Despite Being A Total Fool With No Clues.......John Linton .........about what broad band buyers need, want and will buy - I finally finished the re-vamp of the ADSL2 plans that will be offered from October 1st 2009 at around 2 am yesterday. In the end the changes were far more radical than I had anticipated and addressed far more issues than I had expected to be able to do. I think it was only the freshness of mind of 4 weeks absence from the daily minutiae involved in running a small business which despite, all the strange errors that jet lag induces, allowed such a comprehensive review of the market, the current and possible changes in Exetel's costings and an analysis of the short term future economic pressures to be done in such a relatively short time and produce such a "radically" different set of plans. The constant feedback from current customers throughout the process was almost overwhelmingly negative and, in many ways, that was to be expected because the new ADSL2 plans are not aimed at the profile range of Exetel's current customers who, for the most part, are mature individuals with a realistic knowledge of communications technologies and what it can really do for the more sophisticated user.....there are obviously many exceptions to that within Exetel's current user base but they tend not to be the ones who comment, at least not to me. Exetel has always highly valued its 'intelligent' customers and has shown this in many ways including its Pioneer Discount program which gives Exetel's earliest customers a significant monthly cost saving on whatever plan they use as well as providing them with various 'grace and favour' accommodations to meet their specific needs over the years. We will continue to meet the needs of all of our current customers by allowing them to remain on the various 'generations' of plans that they have selected over the years and many tens of thousands of those plans provide services that make Exetel very little, or in some cases no, money at all. So no current customer has been inconvenienced in any way by the sharp change in 'focus' these new ADSL2 plans represent. The new ADSL2 plans have been aimed at addressing a wider market than Exetel has aimed at in the past. This has become necessary simply because the residential markets available to Exetel have changed and if we don't more closely meet those market's needs then our residential ADSL2 business will decline which is something we would not like to see happen at this stage of the company's development. The new plans are aimed at providing the best value for money at the lowest possible prices to the more 'general' ADSL2 buyers than the more 'sophisticated' buyers which we previously tried to address - or maybe kidded ourselves we did. As far as I can see, and I've looked pretty completely and double and triple checked my analysis, the new plans offer lower prices with more functionality and far more possible add ons (at low prices) than any other provider to three of the more general residential marketplaces - and they do this in a major and conclusive way - no ifs or buts or "if you look at it this ways" type garbage - just straight out lower monthly costs for more of everything. Also no activation fee for either new or churn customers. Also no 18 month or 24 month contracts. Also a choice of ULL, SSS or No PSTN line at all choices - something no other ISP is able to offer from Telstra down to the dregs. So, all in all, a very compelling set of plans that include the very lowest monthly prices and a 'complete' range of options for every level of the three largest residential marketplaces......only in my opinion of course. Despite the criticism I received while developing this new approach, and of course everyone can have an opinion on how to run an ISP, the first day's sales orders were quite pleasing with a noticeable increase which, while in no way meaningful, was more heartening to see than a decrease. I will be particularly interested to see if the different plans that have been targeted at different marketplaces actually work out but that won't be known for quite a while. However I was pleased to see our sales of ADSL via SSS pick up very sharply on the first day. It will be an interesting few weeks to see what happens and whether our intentions are met. For those people who contributed their, positive, suggestions - thank you for your interest and help - I always find other views both interesting and helpful in making final decisions. For those people who suggest I've got it hopelessly wrong - you could well be right but at the end of the day a decision on what Exetel does has to be made and the people who have the most to lose (or gain) from that process have to take the responsibility for making whatever decisions they deem to be in the best interests of Exetel and its customers....they also then get to endlessly agonise over those decisions.
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