John Linton's Personal Musings

........which is only the unfortunate start to 'full swing' in the banal 'business Christmas season'.

December starts tomorrow and when I briefly looked at my diary I see there are more supplier, and possible future supplier, events to which I have been invited that I could attend lunches and evening 'events' each day of this week - on three days I could attend three events. Being the basically anti-social person that I am (I have no 'small talk' whatsoever) I have absolutely no ability to make any form of positive contribution to the 'host's' objectives and the combination of dull (to me) people, warm bottled beer, cheap wine and distressing 'food' make such events an excrutiatingly boring torture for me - and doubtless anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in close enough proximity to feel the need to make polite conversation. I understand that my attitude is not shared by many/any other people which I base on the evident enjoyment which other people seem to look forward to these events and I have sometimes wondered what is wrong with me for taking the views that I do.

Exetel has 26 'suppliers' this year who have been foolish enough to invite me to various 'Christmas' events and a further 7 companies that, for reasons best known to themselves, think we may buy from them in the very near future. Why any of these companies (with one exception) would think that inviting people to cram in to a room (which always seems too small for the number of people they invite) with noise volumes that make sensible conversation impossible (always assuming there actually were people there capable of saying anything worth listening to) would be either enjoyable or useful to the invitees or themselves remains beyond my comprehension. I think it's a frightening indictment of their joint lack of knowledge of their customer's different attitudes that they would continue to send me such invitations - presumably for those suppliers who have dealt with Exetel for many years the fact that I never attend such functions hasn't registered in their CRM databases.

A bit too - "Bah, humbuggish"? Quite possibly; but the 'art of selling' (and the conservation of scarce 'promotional' budgets) seems to be lost on the people within commercial companies who plan and execute the monstrosities that go by the name of customer Christmas parties - or perhaps they do achieve some benefits that I am unaware of. Mind you, there is the occasional exception and I really did appreciate, and was deeply flattered, to be invited to a Christmas lunch hosted by that company's chairman at Sydney's very best restaurant (Tetsuya's) - but I declined as I was sure that I wouldn't have been able to make any sensible contribution to conversation with people I had never met.

There are three 'supplier events' (nothing to do with the need to drink warm beer/bad wine) that I will attend this week which are all technology or 'operational briefings' by highly credentialled and well respected experts in their different fields. I get far fewer of such invitations and usually not from the suppliers themselves but from acquaintances who, for reasons that escape me, seem to think I would be a suitable person to share views with on the topics concerned and use their own company's invitations to give to me. I truly value these sorts of events as they are pure information dissemination without the 'clutter' of trying to sell some sort of product or service which both shortens the time of the 'event' and makes the information more easily understood. It is a requirement of any 'manager' responsible in some way for future planning to keep themselves as up to date as possible with new technologies/ways of using or selling new technologies and that is, for reasons I can't work out, becoming harder in Australia over the past year or so - though I think this possibly only applies to me with the different workload I now have and the type of company I am involved with.

I am also conscious that I am trying to cover far too many technology issues with the time I have available and that I am failing to deliver the required 'solutions' in the required time frames, if at all. I think that just as - "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" the road to mediocrity is paved with not applying enough thought and research to any individual 'product' by having too many products under the 'control' of too few intellectual 'microscopes'. I used to think that I had both the time and the need and the skills to keep abreast of the various options and developments in the simple product set that Exetel offers. I now have a view that isn't the case. I am hoping that the three briefings I will attend this week will help me solve that problem.

Although "it's Christmas season" for 'business' I'm not sure that is a very helpful view of life....but probably the real reason is that as I get older and older my ability to tolerate mindlessness, self interest and greed has almost entirely evaporated.

...and they did begin to come but then they left and never came back? Perhaps the Kevin Costner character was wrong and the whole concept was just Hollywood Schmaltz?

I completed most of the work I am responsible for on the new Wireless Broadband business brochure and the revised wireless broadband web site (particularly the business web site). It seems to me that I have spent most of the last almost three years trying to 'assemble' the correct components of a 'killer' 3G/4G wireless offering in anticipation of the fade out of the ADSL opportunities in Australia and I haven't succeeded in doing that after all the effort that has been expended on it....but it is at least closer than it was when we started.

I looked at yet another 'magic box' for residential users on Friday which, like the one we have sourced from the PRC, now has all of the physical features needed at the pricing we have specified (at least they 'promised' to meet the required price - a bit of a difference I suppose) but once again, just as your hopes begin to rise that the 'quest' is finally over, they quickly gloss over the fact that the VoIP firmware is not yet available......soooooo.....close, but not close enough. The magic box is essential to remove the ludicrously high charges made for HSPA modems by Optus to us and also the sheer inelegance of such a solution for the home user. (The cost of HSPA modems for business users is becoming a 'thing of the past' with more and more of high end laptops/notebooks having multi-frequency wireless chip sets on the MB and mobile hand sets not needing a modem at all).

Doubtless, when all the early advantage is completely lost (we had expected to have had this box some 18 months ago), we will finally find a suitable product but until that time it is back to the search if we can summon the energy. The Yagi antennae have proved a big hit as they did deliver on their promise to allow 'remoter' users to connect to towers as far away as 30 kms and at one third, or less, of the price of other Yagis available from various suppliers in Australia and that is heartening as it too was a relatively long search. The 'magic box' remains necessary to remove the cost to a residential user of having to buy a separate wireless modem and pay the high cost of such devices in Australia (unlike the UK where the cost when we were there in August was 10/15 pounds including a gigabyte of data just to put the Australian situation in its correct context). While we have found a source of a wireless modem at less than half the cost Optus currently charge us (with 4 times the speed) it isn't the right solution for the residential market and I don't particularly want to go down that path.

We have also been considering changing carriers in 2010 as we have had a series of unpleasant experiences (commercial not network) in attempting to build our residential 'country' wireless business based on buying network connectivity from Optus and we see every chance that  those unpleasant experiences will be repeated in 2010 as Exetel move farther away from the ways that Optus prefer to conduct their wholesale business. Of course, in Australia, the options in providing wireless broadband services are extremely limited and that may well not prove possible but, if the business wireless broadband market can be sensibly addressed by Exetel (and we believe it can) then perhaps the limitations of Vodaphone's non-capital city coverage will not be such a barrier as it is for residential markets....however that's the least of our concerns at the moment.

As I said at the start of 2009 the future growth of the residential ADSL market is reaching its end and the future of ADSL will be fraught with price wars in the struggles to maintain customer numbers let alone grow those numbers by those ISPs that are dependent on ADSL revenue and profits. Unfortunately, Telstra holds all the 'aces' in that scenario by maintaining ADSL1 prices at artificial highs and reducing its own ADSL2 prices to 'force' its own customers to migrate to ADSL2 (where it is the standout non-participant in the ADSL2 'churn' process). By doing this they 'lock out' their own customer base as a source of growth for those ISPs who desire to 'lure' BigPond customers to their ADSL2 services. In the meantime the other ISPs will continue to fight among themselves to take each other's customers and make less progress (and profit) than they are committed to. You didn't have to be too bright to see this coming and that any business plan based on residential ADSL was not going to be a pretty sight round about now.

Maybe I'm wrong, it certainly wouldn't be the first time, but I'll take any bet that for any communications company to grow in 2010 onwards it isn't going to be via residential ADSL. There are at least three other mainstream communications services that will deliver increasing growth and, as far as I can see, that's where sensible efforts and investments need to be made - ADSL is in its sunset years and the barbarians, if not yet at the gate, are clearly visible on the inner hill tops. (apologies to Bryan Burrough and John Helyar)

Apart from the jet lag, I felt refreshed from 4 days in the totally different environment in Sri Lanka and encouraged by the progress in our operations I saw there. I also had an enjoyable corporate sales meeting yesterday where our nine recent graduates had set a new record by selling well over 60 new corporate Ethernet services in November (having sold over 50 in October)  with one full working day left - a quite remarkable achievement and one they, and we, can take a great deal of comfort in as we build the corporate business to much higher targets next year. As the day 'wore on' I spent some time 'analysing' the Telstra announcement of new ADSL pricing to attempt to understand what Telstra were aiming to address (apart from the fact that a larger percentage of their users than previously have obviously become aware of Telstra's massive over charging for simple ADSL services and have been moving away from BigPond services in greater numbers than previously).

My conclusions after around an hour of looking at the Telstra web site are that all Telstra has done is to use the much lower costs of IP that they have had in place since they activated their own undersea cable to Hawaii (which they have benefited from for over 18 months) to 'lower' their extravagantly high prices to merely heavy overcharging type pricing.

First take the 'head line' "major" changes:

"From 1 December 2009, Telstra's new broadband plans will offer:

• Ten times more data allowance on the entry level plan - BigPond®
  Turbo ADSL or Cable plan offering 2GB of included data for $29.95 per
  month for 24 months¹ when combined with a Telstra home phone² on a
  single bill.
• New high usage plans of 100GB and 200GB to satisfy the growing demand for movie downloads and more family members connecting at the same time.
• The BigPond® Elite Liberty (12GB) - ADSL plan for $59.95 per month for 24 months¹ - when combined with a Telstra home phone² on a single bill. This is $20 less per month than our current 12 month broadband pricing."

To claim "ten times more" when the base you previously offered was 200 mbytes which does absolutely nothing for any user simply  means you have stopped Attila the Hun type gouging the end user for the 15 cents per mb they inevitably incurred when using such a plan. NO reputable (and almost no disreputable) ISPs ever tried to pretend that 200 megabytes would ever be a reasonable allowance for a broadband user. Exetel's lowest cost ADSL (1 or 2) plans at the same monthly cost as Telstra's have either a 5gb or 6 gb included DOWN load (no upload is counted in Exetel plans unlike Telstra's), no need to sign up for 24 months plus Exetel's plan have a 12 hour uncharged use period each day - and many other ISPs have free use periods of one type or another.

The new high use ADSL2 plans of 100 gb and 200 gb on a 12 month contract cost $A130 and $A180 respectively (you would never 'bundle' those plans with another Telstra service if you had a second brain cell). These costs are so much higher than every other ISP's equivalent plans they only represent a "saving" if you are a current BigPond User.

As for the 12 gb plan, it's hard to find an ISP that offers a 12 gb plan any more but for $A25.00 less than BigPonds new, 'reduced', charge of $A60.00 a month you can get an Exetel ADSL2 plan with 25 gb for $A35.00 per month on a 12 month contract.

So Telstra's "NEW, Reduced price" plans are around 100% more than all the better priced ISPs and to move to a range of around 60% more the end user has to sign up for additional services and long contract terms to ensure they continue to get ripped off for as long as possible as prices will continue to fall over the coming months let alone over the next two years.

It's hard to work out how many end users would be stupid enough to select any of the 'new' Telstra plans over the choice from other ISPs - I would think an end user would have to be terminally stupid to do that. So these 'new' plans don't seem to be aimed at non-BigPond users at all - they seem to be aimed at reducing the haemoraging of current BigPond users by giving them some small monthly cost reductions on their current plans or, in many cases, simply more downloads for the same exhorbitant monthly cost. I don't see how it can be looked at in any other way - Telstra is trying to stop the drain of churn aways at the lowest possible reduction in actual charges and current revenue.

Of course, such a conclusion is only my obviously biased opinion......but some others share it:

http://digihub.smh.com.au/node/1457

......the ONLY reason that Telstra would "reduce prices" to every other ISP's 2006 levels.

I read the announcement by Telstra BigPond that it had reduced prices to correct its over charging in this article:

http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/media/announcements_article.cfm?ObjectID=46084

and thought that some of the 'announcement' revealed more about the state of the broadband market than Telstra wished to do. It seems clear, at least to me, that the decline in Telstra's ADSL business that was evident in their FY2009 annual report has not only continued in to the first five months of FY2010 but has accelerated with Telstra continuing to lose the market share it so expensively bought with its raft of 'promotional' offers over the past three or so years. All it has really done now is to make the 'promotional offers' its 'list prices' - and these 'new list prices' remain far more expensive than any other broadband provider in Australia and, as usual, have so many 'strings' you actually wonder why they bother.

Telstra apparently thinks that the broadband market has "suddenly changed" and people don't use ADSL for email and browsing but (stop the presses I have a scoop) people now play on line games and download movies!!!! Good Heavens Holmes - this is amazing! Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to work at Telstra and continue to have to adjust to the Orwellian type levels of Newspeak and ignore all obvious signs of reality so that the words that come out of your mouth reflect the unreality of Telstra's public utterances which need careful control so that you appear to believe the sort of nonsense that is contained in Telstra's public statements that vary so much from the actualities they address.

Skim reading the "new" pricing on offer it seems to me that only a complete fool would select a broadband service supplied by Telstra and that complete fool would have to be a wealthy complete fool to pay at least double the price of acquiring a broadband service than is available from practically any other broadband provider......but all that means is that nothing has changed.....you always had to be a complete fool to buy from Telstra.....so you really have to wonder what has changed by announcing these new plans? Practically nothing other than Telstra have readjusted the weasel words they use to attempt to obfuscate the fact that they charge very high prices for very, very little. I doubt that these 'new plans' will stop their market share decline and all they are is a new level of prices to be heavily discounted from in a new round of 'special promotional offers that, presumably, will start by their telemarketing contractors this weekend.

It will be interesting to see what level of uptake the various ISPs report to the ABS at the end of December - as it seems that from the little 'publicly available information' that it isn't only Telstra that has experienced a drop in ADSL customer numbers. I only say that because I look at the 'churn in' versus 'churn away' numbers to/from Exetel as a guide to what may be happening in overall terms and those two numbers have shown a continuous 'improvement' each month for the past five months despite the fact that we have now raised the 'churn in' price from zero to its highest ever level over the past two months....we tend to use the cost of churn/activation as a crude 'braking mechanism' control over the order inflow for ADSL. Those figures won't be available until early February though. One indication of how the larger ISPs are doing will be to see if they make adjustments to their own plans after they 'digest' what if any impact the Telstra announcements will have - my guess is that they will simply laugh and take no action at all. We will not be taking any action (though it might be sensible to add 100gb and 200 gb plans just to show what should be paid) and our ADSL sales are very healthy and have met our planned numbers for each of the first 5 months of FY2010 and are up 20% on average from the same months last year.

The residential ADSL market will be interesting to observe over the next few months to see whether the decline in 'take up' continues or whether the combined efforts of the ISPs that are dependent on revenue growth from ADSL find ways of arresting it. As I estimated some six months ago - the prices paid by end users will continue to fall (at least in terms of gb per dollar) as the decline 'bites' and the enthusiastic estimates of the "well respected experts" (and the predictions of growth in the various company's annual reports) confronts the realities of wireless growth and a need to reduce ADSL prices as competitors try and shore up their FY2010 forecasts by trying to make their services appear more competitive.

At least no-one will have to worry about Telstra becoming a threat by introducing more competitive broadband offerings - based on their latest announcements.

.........continuing to lose credulous supporters?

As someone who set out the
HSPA 'solution' to the then proposed NBN1 I had a quiet chuckle at one
of the nay sayers of that time, getting on for two years ago,
completely changing their tune in this article:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/nbn-battle-goes-down-to-the-wire-20091125-jppw.html

It doesn't really matter what this particular "One of Australia's most respected telecommunications analysts" says or doesn't say all that matters is that you remember that what he previously said was totally wrong and it was based on no knowledge at all. I actually don't get where these media labels like "most respected" come from as they
are never credentialed and this particular analyst has little or no
knowledge of any sort of telecommunications technology and trends and it is doubtful that anyone "respects" him. His own words demonstrate that he knows nothing and deserves no respect:

"The ferocity of the shift from fixed line to wireless/mobile has again caught us by surprise."

and:

"Yet again, we have underestimated the pace of this shift," Mr Guerra said."

Mr
Guerra might have completely misunderstood the situation but it is very
certain that Telstra, as the most obvious example, didn't underestimate
it and Optus probably was only a year behind Telstra with only, by his
own admission, Mr Guerra (and the morons called the current Federal
government) not having the slightest clue about why HSPA would grow as
it did. Mind you Telstra, Optus and even me only had to read the EU and
Asian media to understand what impact HSPA and its follow ons were
going to have on wire line based broad band....it didn't take a lot of
research or a crystal ball to see what was going to happen.

Not
that any of that makes any difference to anything because irrespective
of how much inadequate people try and second guess technology it just
continues along its pre-ordained path (just like all of its
predecessors) and happens anyway. The current fools in Canberra want to
build a new publicly paid for network to replace all the current
networks for only one reason - Krudd needs to cover up his lies told to
win the last election for at least to the next election and to do that
he needs further obfuscation which his spin spivs have told him is to
threaten Telstra with break up so it doesn't occur to anybody that
Telstra already has a national broadband network that will do the job
for 'free' and that any network that doesn't have Telstra's subscribers
is never, but never ever, going to work.

Apart from that, as even
someone as uninformed as I was about HSPA two years ago knew, it was
obvious that the mobile carriers were going to continue to roll out
their wireless data networks and were going to continue to increase the
speeds, improve the latency and reduce the costs. LTE (more than two
years ago) had already been road mapped with delivery in many countries
well before the end of 2010. It was a planning time line in August 2008
but in late 2009 it looks like hitting or improving on those time
estimates. So since Krudd's first stupid pre-last election lie about
the now abandoned 'NBN1' the mobile carriers, as even 'blind Freddie'
could have seen at that time have continued to roll out and improve
their mobile data networks and have continued to make an 'NBN2" look an
even bigger white elephant even greater gargantuan proportions as each
month passes.

Now even the dummies who are otherwise described as
"most highly respected communications analysts" are backing down from
even their worthless support for Krudd's posturing. Big deal you may
well say...and you may well be correct in general terms. But the
reality is that Krudd and co are still, in their moronic stupidity,
playing around with Australia's key communications structures for the
sole purpose of covering up their gross stupidities and their
outrageous lies. It will be interesting to watch the worm wriggle on
the hook as he tries to talk his way out of his insane statements
between now and next June. so much useless iron waiting to rust.

In
the mean time, as Telstra stated, mobile customers now exceed wire line
customers and the real technology 'race' in Australia is to convert
each other's wire line telephone and data customers to the 4G networks
that will be deliverable in the not too distant future - DSLAMs are just expensive iron waiting to rust.

...why is it that so few actually deliver it?

We completed the second day of the Sri Lankan company review
yesterday which remains on schedule with only some relatively minor aspects to
be cleared up tomorrow. Annette also completed almost all of the personnel
reviews by COB and we will do the full personnel review after completing the
business plan review tomorrow morning. The Sri Lankan company has grown rapidly
over the last few months and  will
continue to grow as rapidly over the coming three months if we continue to
develop the facilities as we have discussed over the past two days.

Our objectives are to create as perfect a customer support
and service operation as it is possible to deliver for Australian users of
residential data communication services. Such aspirations, when they are put
into a few words, always sound pretentious in various ways and are often
meaninglessly empty and can be found as company objectives on web sites and ‘promotional’
literature scattered over the width and breadth of Australia. In simplistic terms
it is stated to be the essential element of commercial success and, I suppose,
in some ways that can be true in certain circumstances because really it isn’t
exactly difficult to achieve….. all that is needed is money and time plus the
commitment of the directors of the company to have it achieved.

I’ve heard  it said ,
many times, that any company can do it – if they want to.

As can be seen from the article by Paul Sheehan cited
yesterday  and the comments attached to it,
company’s as large and wealthy as Telstra don’t come within a mythical “bull’s
roar” of achieving it. Telstra are not alone in that failure it is a lack of
achievement replicated by practically every other data communications provider
in Australia in some degree or other. For companies like Telstra, or Optus or
AAPT or (fill in any name you care to) it isn’t a matter of money, they all
have the money and often spend more than is required.  It isn’t even a lack of desire to make it
happen – that can be concluded from the amount of money the various larger companies
actually spend on their customer support operations. It’s often the inadequacy
of the management entrusted with the objective of achieving it, probably more
often that the lack of money or the lack of directorial will.

Exetel does have the directorial will to aim to provide perfect
service. We certainly don’t have anything like the money available to any of
our larger ‘competitors’ and we very definitely won’t have the profit margins available
to any of our competitors, and by virtue of our base tenet that we must always
offer the lowest priced services at all times we never will have, so throwing
money at “service” is never going to be available to us. We may or may not have
the managerial dedication and skill but that can’t possibly be known at this
time.

So why aim at such a very, very difficult objective? The
obvious reason is that ‘support service’ is at least one element of any  truly successful service type in any market of any service offering and without it
then you need major advantages in other areas which, for a company of Exetel’s
size, are difficult to achieve because the buying power of our much larger ‘competitors’
will never be available to a company of our siz. So the two things that are available to a smaller company competing with larger companies is the quality of people they acquire and the skill with which they manage them and the results superior people managed and directed in a superior way can bring to bear on their services. In other words the simple way of approaching the issue is to have better people - and it is that simple.

Exetel have the opportunity, by hiring truly excellent people in Sri Lanka (which we have the opportunity of doing because we choose to pay three times more than other companies and provide working conditions that are, at least, three times better than other employers) to deploy customer support personnel that are in every way 'superior' in terms of the ability to deliver the very best standards of customer service. The only thing that we can't be sure we have is the management dedication and long term commitment to making a perfect customer support operation a reality. So that is our challenge in Sri Lanka and what we will concentrate on later today.

It will be the first step to delivering perfect customer service - unless we fail like so many other commercial operations before us.

Continue reading "Every Commercial Company Claims To Offer Excellent Customer Service...."

.....as it applies to providing "support" of telecommunication services?

It was, perhaps, apposite that I read this article from a well known journalist (I would have added "respected" to the appellation but I'm not sure that any Australian journalist writing today is respected by anyone with any judgment credibility though the man himself seems to think he is a responsible scribbler and is employed by a Fairfax publication which he seems to think is no barrier to journalistic credibility):

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/your-call-is-important-to-us-20091122-isqh.html?comments=154#comments

as I started a three day review of Exetel's Sri Lankan residential support and back office processing facilities. I thought that apart from self describing himself as a total 'goose' and a charmless person, Paul Sheehan completely assassinated himself as a reasonable human being and someone who should be regarded as anything but a totally stupid moron whose sub-editor mistook his racist rant for something newsworthy.

As one of the responders to his article replied to him:

"it amazes me why people use telstra or optus when there are cheaper services out there.

Cheaper landline phones

Cheaper internet

Cheaper business solutions

Cheaper mobiles

and i'm not talking optus either they're just as bad.

Most important for me is the top dollar service i get at a
competitor. rather than hold they call me back, and they do with out
fault. thats right they call me back where can you go wrong with that?

Why use them competitors beat telstra on all their services, except for the monopoly of foxtel.

grass is greener"

Of course there are many dozens of replies along the same lines.However the overt racism expressed by a journalist in an allegedly "major" Australian newspaper is an interesting insight in to all sorts of things that were totally wrong about this article starting with a major newspaper giving space to a personal rant which, when you boil it down to its essentials was about a petulant precious darling stamping his foot because he didn't pay his bill - the only difference between Paul Sheehan and the average wanker who rants on online fora as he did is that somehow his newspaper owner allowed his personal racism to be printed in a large circulation newspaper. Very odd.

I have no problem in any person 'condemning' their supplier of any service for incompetence in their particular case; though making negative comments about Telstra is not exactly "news" for so many users of their services as the attached comments to the article appear to demonstrate. Having a negative Telstra support story is about as unusual as having a negative comment on the weather - and as equally un-newsworthy.

But why did this journalist insist on making his anti-Telstra points in a way that slammed non-Australian personnel, all of whom are employees of Telstra and interleaved his Telstra slamming article with pieces of "But then an Aussie fixed my problem within a few seconds?

I have spent the last working day in Exetel's Sri Lankan office and in between the review processes I have sat at a desk in the office catching up on my 'Australian' emails and phone calls which has allowed me to 'listen in to' the various conversations of the people around me. Unlike Paul Sheehan's alleged experiences all I heard were Sri Lankan nationals speaking better English than the overwhelming majority of the people to whom they were speaking. This was not surprising to me because Exetel's hiring policy in Sri Lanka stresses that we only employ fluent English speakers and the overwhelming majority of Exetel's Sri Lankan personnel were educated in Australian or UK universities and have worked in the UK in support positions - it is not an exaggeration to say that many of them speak more precisely and more clearly than I do. (not having met Paul Sheehan I can't comment on how clearly and understandably he speaks).

I can also say, based on answering support calls for Exetel in its early days, that many of the people I spoke to were far more difficult to understand than the least English language capable of Exetel Sri Lanka's current employees. Undoubtedly many of Exetel's employees in Colombo have a long way to go in terms of having 100% knowledge of our huge range of services and all aspects of how they operate but I would think that the least knowledgeable of them would be more competent in any aspect of any service's operation than Paul Sheehan is in writing a sensible newspaper article.

.......in terms of the usual communications company "Christmas specials" and the blanket advertising.

I was hoping to finish off the development of the corporate wireless broadband offerings on the flights to Sri Lanka and the 'spare time' on Sunday but it remains far more difficult than I can deal with and follow on work for the residential plans is therefore also on hold. There are two main reasons for not coming to a conclusion on the corporate offering - the basic pricing that Exetel can obtain from a carrier on a Layer 2 service and the linked mobile rates. Neither of these issues presents much of an opportunity of doing anything 'dramatic' and the necessity of also providing a 'small business' wireless offering complicates both of those difficult situations. In terms of residential plans - I simply can't find a way of addressing the current issues you can make it at all times. in any meaningful way.

Since Mr Thodey announced that Telstra would be introducing reduced pricing for ADSL2 services "imminently" some time ago I had also expected a change to Telstra's wireless broadband approach to both the residential markets and some changes to the way they provide wireless services to corporate users. I expected any changes made by Telstra to trigger a range of changes by several of the other providers of both services. So, with no changes from Telstra announced at this time I am beginning to think that it would be prudent to wait and see what now transpires with the "Christmas promotion season" now already a week or so past its customary start date with, presumably, the other providers delaying their announcements of Christmas promotions until they see what Telstra is going to do - a real bunch of pussies but that's what you are forced in to doing when you play the Telstra pricing umbrella game and only base your pricing on how high you can make it.

So I think we are going to be constrained to completing the new back end facilities with some help from one or two of our larger customers who already use our wireless services and waiting until 'the last minute' to decide on the 'final' per MB pricing for the corporate and small business plans. With a bit of luck we should be able to complete the wireless fleet plan user management portal before the end of this week which would allow us to have any new HSPA offering for all three marketplaces 'announced' for December 1st. Given the current status of all of those activities (when I left Australia) it is going to be tight but possible.

I have become dependent on HSPA for my daily computer usage and the few other people I know who use wireless broad band share my usage patterns with the sheer convenience of using a note book practically anywhere overcoming the slighter inconvenience of knowing the cost is still higher than using wire line broadband and experiencing the occasional speed or straight out connectivity issue. The future promise of LTE and the continued build out of all carrier's wireless networks promises to ensure a real explosion in wireless broadband usage in 2010 - far more spectacular than even the quite impressive growth experienced in 2009.

However I am beginning to think that the financial pressures of the continued, and accelerating, network builds will actually mitigate against any, let alone substantial pricing reductions in wireless per mb pricing either at the retail or wholesale levels.

Picking a way through the 'marketing issues' of pricing comparisons is what I referred to in the opening sentence of this meandering - it is certainly not something I can see a way through and it seems to me the ONLY way for Exetel to go is to find just one 'exclusive' advantage of buying from our small company instead of direct from Optus and Vodafone or from the Optus/Vodafone retail service resellers which, given the likelihood of some sort of belated "Christmas specials" will be quite difficult. I have yet to come up with any sort of exclusives but there is still a few days to settle on a strategy - lucky there is not much else taking up the time this week.

...but some people think  they are.

We made it to Colombo but due to a variety of circumstances we didn't check in to the hotel until 1.00 am in the morning which is 6.30 am Sydney time - a long travel time. It was a little strange leaving Sydney with temperatures in the 30s and arriving to a 'cool' Sri Lanka at 25 degrees - though the 99% humidity level reminded you that you were in the tropics. It was raining (out of season) which made the always 'exciting' drive from the airport to the hotel a touch more hair raising. Nevertheless it is nice to return to this country which, despite the crushing rural and fringe city poverty maintains a cheerful and helpful attitude in almost everyone you meet.

My main objective this trip is to review the basic operations of the Sri Lankan company from the ground up now that the new General Manager has had six months or so to make whatever agreed changes he believed were appropriate and to recruit people who will meet the objectives we have set for the overall Sri Lankan operation. Anette will do the quarterly reviews with each Sri Lankan employee as a separate process and we will then hold a joint review of exactly what pint we have reached and set monthly goals for the remainder of the financial year. It is an ambitious program to be completed in 4 working days and we also have to make time for a number of 'outside' meetings which will not make it any easier.

Occasionally, and less recently than when we commenced this 'venture', I get ranted at for "taking Aussie jobs offshore". Such rants simply demonstrate the stupidity of the ranter who presumably uses a modem from the PRC to connect his Taiwanese made computer to the internet while watching his down loaded movies on a Korean LCD or Plasma display. We set up support and logistical services in Sri Lanka to allow the various ranters to get the best possible value for the lowest possible price and to be able to remain in business in a very competitive set of market places. (as I'm writing this blog I'm sitting next to someone answering support/sales calls and she is calm, correct, precise and very, very helpful and very, very patient).

There is simply no comparison in the quality of dedication to the work and the knowledge brought to the work and, most importantly, the longevity of willingness to continue to work in a call centre/support centre operation of our Sri Lankan personnel to all my experiences of being associated with Australians working in Australian based call centres. Our first three Sri Lankan engineers are still with us and will reach their fifth anniversary as Exetel employees in the first quarter of next year. The longest any of our Australian engineers remained in a call centre position was less than two years before they had to be offered another engineering job within Exetel or we would lose them. There is nothing wrong with that - engineers in Australia will accept a 'starting position' in a call centre to get a job straight out of university or TAFE but that's exactly how they regard it - "not a real job" and one that they try to get away from as quickly as possible. Of course you can get slightly longer service out of non-engineering graduates (particularly people who have not got degrees and there very definitely are a small percentage of people who do really want to become a support professional - but at least in my experience, they are a minority - though I have been associated with several exceptional exceptions.

Completely different attitude in Sri Lanka.

When we began the process of transferring residential support, residential sales, admin and provisioning jobs from Sydney to Colombo we recognised that we would lose the accumulated experience of all of those different people in Sydney and our base accumulated knowledge of those processes would go from somewhere around 750 'man months'  to zero over a short space of time. It was a known risk and a known sacrifice that we were prepared to endure in the short term for the medium and long term benefits that we were certain the process would deliver. You don't have to be a business genius to understand that if you have support personnel with an average of 3 years in the job then they will do a better job than if they only had a maximum of nine or so months.

This review will establish how much progress has been made to making the Exetel call centre as good as any similar call centre on the planet. More importantly it will allow bench marks to be put in place to continue to drive all aspects of the Sri Lankan operation towards better performances, whatever the current levels, than the ones that are currently being achieved. I have always been impressed by our Sri Lankan people and I don't expect to see any decline in the operation in any way and, based on the figures and QOS measures we have in place I am looking forward to the next few days and hope to play a part in assisting the continuing development of the Exetel people here.

....when you have too much to do in any given time frame.

Annette and I will fly to Sri Lanka later today to do the quarterly personnel and business reviews and to follow up on some new initiatives. We now have approaching 40 people in the Colombo office ad have completed the transfer of all residential services to the Colombo office as well as half of our internal programming and development functions. We have come a very long way since we started to 'explore' the possibilities of using work from home engineers in another country to offer 'extended week day support' hours up to 10 pm back in December 2005 and then hired the first two engineers in Sri Lanka in January 2005.

In retrospect it was a very brave move by three people who had zero experience in establishing an operation in a third world country and who were already over stretched in struggling to establish a start up business in Australia. It is less than two years ago (February 2008) that we went to Colombo for the first time to, with the aid of the Australian High Commission, meet the various people we would need in this endeavour and to, most importantly, meet with the people within the Sri Lankan government whose permission and contract approvals we would need to operate a business in Sri Lanka. That was a very fraught week with the guns and tanks everywhere we drove, the extreme heat, the barely understandable English spoken by many of the people we met (we couldn't speak a word of Sinhali) and the prevalent poverty.

We had between 7 and 9 appointments each day with different government departments, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, equipment providers, communications providers, banks, office fit out contractors and possible jv partners. By the time we left after six days of that we were mentally exhausted and quite bewildered but we had selected an office, picked a fit out contractor, signed an HOA with the Board of Investment, appointed lawyers and accountants to act for us and opened a bank account. All we had to do then was make it happen within 4 months and recruit the various people we would need to start up the operation and find the people from the Australian company to 'spare' to go to Sri Lanka to manage the training and knowledge transfer.

We went back in May 2008 to progress all of the various issues and, to our dismay, found that very little had progressed as far as our continual emailed correspondence had assured us it had - which we had thought may very well be the case but hoped it was otherwise - we didn't expect to find that so little had been done and by the evening of the first day back in Colombo even two very stiff scotches could not engender any sort of hopefulness. Nevertheless, over the next four days we managed to get everything back on track and managed to find an apartment to rent for the imminent arrival of the appointed Australian Exetel manager. By the time we flew out we had, somehow, managed to get all of the legal paperwork signed and had some hope we would make our July 1st dead line which we only missed by a week or so.

Our Australian appointed manager flew in at the end of June 2008 to manage the completion of the fit out and the installation of the communications services and to, most importantly, hire the first 4 people to be trained. Over the succeeding 15 months months we have grown the Sri Lankan establishment by an average of 2 nett (we made mistakes in hiring and we have had to get used to a very different 'culture' in terms of attitudes to careers and employment conditions generally) new people each month and have expanded our initial office space. We have succeeded in meeting the overwhelming majority of our objectives and while there is a very long way to go the successful operation of residential support facilities outside Australia has been an essential element in the continual growth and financial well being of the Australian company.

Hopefully, over the next 6 - 8 months we will succeed in meeting all of the remaining objectives and this month's business and personnel reviews are focused on achieving that.

We have come a very long way in well under two years in establishing a viable and highly contributive "off shore" entity that makes Exetel Australia more competitive than it otherwise would be.

Perhaps it is just that Paul Broad mirrors so completely my own views on the political 'face saving' stunt known as the 'NBN2' as expressed here:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nbn-a-ploy-to-break-up-telstra-aapt/story-e6frg8zx-1225799459076

that encourages me to think that, finally, some sensible views of Krudds narcissistic  nonsense will become further and further exposed over the next month or so before he irrevocably destroys Australia's communications industry. Maybe wishful thinking that it can all be stopped before too much damage is done.

I wont regurgitate Paul Broad's points other than to say it's nice to see someone else say that the re-creation of the old Telecom Australia (a government owned and operated communications monopoly funded by the Australian taxpayer in two ways - by using tax dollars to set it up and then by running it by charging exhorbitant costs that all monopolies charge) makes as much sense as Krudd's continual apologies to some group or another. In other words - Krudd tries to cover up the fact that he does absolutely nothing since being elected and each time someone in the media raises that point he tries to obfuscate the issue by raising a cloud of nonsensical trivia that attempts to replace analysis of his stupidity with some sort of transient emotionalism that leads nowhere.

"And let me just say this - I make NO apology for protecting working Australian families from the grievous inadequacies of the opposition when I say this". Sound familiar? It must do - I've lost count of the number of times Krudd has started a statement with...."I make no apology", referencing working Australian families and then ending such sentences with sententious nonsense - before, when he is really looking like getting into trouble - announcing he will be apologising to someone or other. But - back to reality.

Irrespective of whether it was Beazely's fault for the mess made of privatising Telecom Australia or the incoming coalition government for not making the necessary changes to that process there is NO doubt that a federal government built and operated "New" Telecom monopoly is not going to solve anything. No amount of Krudd outright lying or a totally stupid media's non-analysis of the 'NBN2' nonsense will change the fact that it is a complete waste of money, doomed to failure with the concomitant downside of screwing up what is already in place and working to the benefit of all Australians (not just the dummies who might vote Labor at the next election). As Paul Broad correctly says - "if the government wants to spend $XX billions of dollars to get re-elected spend it on the 'watering of Australia' by finding ways to move the floods caused by the torrential rains in the North of the continent to the middle and South of the continent". It may not be possible, it may waste a lot of money but, you know what? - "It's all about jobs and a better future for all Australians" and if it does fail no harm will have been done to anyone nor will anything have been destroyed.

Just kidding - such a thing would require a scintilla of imagination and removing the snout from the trough long enough to ask someone with some mild competence and initiative to get it done.....not going to happen in my lifetime.

All monopolies are bad - Government monopolies are worse. There has never been a government in the history of the human race that has ever done anything better than, for lack of a better description - "private enterprise", and there never will be - all government built infrastructure costs double or treble what it should because of the corruption of every government 'decision maker' who has ever existed and their sole objective of fleecing the tax payers of as much money as possible for themselves during their time in 'office' and if their is anything left over for their family and friends....and that's when they have some vague knowledge of what they are funding. In Krudd's case he hasn't got the knowledge or the intellect (I am excluding his politician's rat cunning - apologies to all rats) to comprehend the issues involved in a government funded communication network - all he intended to do was bail himself about his election winning lies of building a national network for $A5 billion that after 18 months was shown up as a total stupid lie and he invented a bigger lie to cover up the first one.

So it is nice to see Paul Broad put the Krudd rubbish in clear perspective yesterday. It will be interesting to see whether Singtel's LTE plans announced earlier this week will spook Telstra or whether, as evidenced by their Melbourne announcement yesterday they are prepared to tough it out until there is a Krudd back down or a change of government. Either way Krudd has now backed himself into a totally unwinnable position.

.....bigger than residential wireless market?

We have begun the work on putting in place a business HSPA offering along the lines of the ideas I listed last weekend. There is a lot to do to get a new 'concept' taken from 'we should do this' to actually making the first sales and sometimes I wonder whether or not we take the correct approach. However it has always seemed to work in the past but over the last few months it seems that there are more people involved which instead of speeding the process appears to slow it down - though that may well be just my imagination. We have definitiely moved away from the "Field of Dreams" concepts on which we operated Exetel for the first five years of our existence and perhaps it is being forced to learn those new, to us, concepts that is taking the extra time.

We received the latest samples of a 7.2+ mbps wireless modem earlier this week which appears to be as easy/easier to activate than the Optus supplied Huawei device and at 50% of the Optus price for that device. Initial testing results are very good and its only shortcoming is the lack of the slot for an external aerial connection. We have asked the factory for this modification and will see what they come up with. We also received the latest iteration of the 'magic box' from the same factory which is now very, very close to the specifications we set out to find over two years ago - it seems to take us an awfully long time to find simple hardware from a trustworthy factory. However the price point we targetted has now been achieved and the device itself seems OK apart from the fact that they didn't include the FX ports in the sample they sent! - bit of a problem as that was an agreed part of the specification. But it does, for the first time, include a sim slot that eliminates the need for a separate wireless modem thus considerably reducing the cost for an end user.

In terms of the 'back end' code for the new provisioning, billing, payment, end user portal facilities we will get that completed as quickly as our brilliant programming team always complete every assignment - 'in the blink of an eye'. When I listen to our major suppliers excuses for why the most minor of billing changes ends up taking over twelve months and then involves constant errors and manual kluges I thank God for her kindness in blessing us with the programmers and designers we have within our company that are always so instantly responsive and write such clean code first time. Most of those facilities will be in place well before the end of November.

We will complete the web site changes in a similar time frame and will take not much longer to produce the suggested brochure and we have also got agreement from one of our 'fleet' customers to produce a 'case study' on how they use their 80 or so Exetel wireless services to improve the operation of their business. That may take a week to get done because I will be in Sri Lanka next week and may not be able to get the text for the various parts of the brochure written and proof read as efficiently as that needs to happen....but we shouldn't be delayed by that 'inconvenience' for too long.

I have no real idea of how large the market is for business/corporate mobile data services but I could find a whole lot of reasons to make a case that it's as big or bigger than the residential markets for such services. It is also a set of markets that the current carriers and their resellers are extremely ill equipped to address - at least that is my opinion based on the little knowledge I possess at the moment (but which continues to increase). With the 'preliminary' announcement by Optus/Singtel yesterday that they will begin real trials of LTE in Australia in 2010 the interest in Optus wireless broadband network will significantly increase as the potential of LTE speeds (theoretically over 150 mbps in certain conditions) will erode any perception that Telstra has a superior wireless technology -  if nothing else.

So there is a lot of work to do in not very much time (including educating and training Exetel's nascent business sales team) but, hopefully, we have, this time, eliminated the ability of the scummier companies in the Australian IP industry to screw up our ideas and investments.

Though that may well just continue to demonstrate just how naive I am.

....not something it is sensible to do unless there are no alternatives.

On page 50 of the AFR today there is an article in which David Teoh states that TPG's purchase of Pipe may allow it to offer 24 hour a day unlimited usage plans as Pipe's network has enough capacity to make that a possibility. Of course, that was said in answer to  question at a press conference so it might not happen but it is the clearest possible indication that helping TPG fund its ability to put you out of business is not something any competitor would not give some serious thought to.

Since the announcement by TPG that it was going to buy Pipe (if it could find the finance) we have had a brief look at how sensibly we could move the few links we have with Pipe to another provider - we only spend around $A40,000 a month so 'losing' our business is not going to make the slightest bit of difference to Pipe's overall revenues. We use Pipe for a few cross connects between different data centres in various capital cities and for two interstate cross connects that are not very big. In the 'old days' Pipe offered such services at significantly lower prices than most competitors and as they have been a reliable, and generally responsive, provider we have only made cursory attempts at obtaining better pricing for the services we buy. It has been a cost/effective and useful relationship for many years. We have never bought IP from them as they have only recently been able to offer a deliverable service and, it appeared to us, that when we talked to them over the past three years the actual ability to deliver date was constantly moving backwards - not unusual in any project of that size. 

When we read about the proposed takeover of Pipe by TPG we made the assumption that it was probable that the financing would eventuate (we doubted that TPG would have gone this far if their banks hadn't indicated the financing would be OK - though it did seem a bit of a stretch) and that we should move our Pipe supplied links to a neutral supplier when the contract periods were up. Moving the interstate links was a 'no-brainer' because we had already used a different carrier for the four later PoPs (in ACT, SA, WA and TAS) that charged us lower rates than Pipe and which had proved equally reliable over the time those interstate links had been in place. We would almost have certainly moved those links on financial grounds in any case. What has surprised me, nothing in contract form just quotations, is that several other intra-capital fibre providers now appear to offer faster links than we currently have from Pipe (a couple of which have only recently been installed) at lower prices than we are currently paying to Pipe - which we had previously considered to be very cost/effective.

I suppose I shouldn't really be surprised as the problem with 2/3 year contracts is that you don't have any reason to look at the costs of the services provided under those contracts until close to the end of contract dates and you get used to thinking in terms of the prices you are paying as being 'reasonable'. One of the real down sides of long term contracts. So the net result so far, and subject to obtaining the actual circuit contracts, is that we will reduce the amounts we pay for the Pipe circuits by up to 30% over the coming months as the various contracts end. It will be a pain to have to make the infrastructure changes involved (which I suppose is why so many companies operate on a 'sign and forget' basis for smaller purchases) but they are a once off and hopefully painless.

I don't know if any other of Pipe's current customers will look at what they are paying to Pipe for similar services but I would think that Pipe's competitors would look at the possible TPG take over as an opportunity to pick over their old 'lost business' files and make new approaches to all of the obvious Pipe customers - however that is not necessarily going to happen when I consider the general lack of 'energy' most of such companies demonstrate at the 'new business development' levels when we approach them over the years - it seems we are doing such suppliers a favour by requesting them to quote for our business needs - probably because we have always been so small they can't be bothered to make the effort to provide a quotation within a reasonable time frame. Though, to be fair, it may simply be a phase the industry is going through as it was something I have noticed about Pipe themselves over the past 12 months or so - despite several requests I don't think we have ever received a quote for IP bandwidth which there has been so much talk about in the media - I took that to mean that Exetel are too small as a 'target' for Pipe although our IP purchases continue to increase month on month and at now over 5 gbps I would have thought they were worth at least providing a quote for - apparently not - perhaps, despite all the hype, they couldn't meet today's "market pricing" of sub $A90.00 per mbps.

So I think, at least for Exetel, the TPG proposed takeover of Pipe has been a good thing because it has forced us to re-look at our second tier network link pricing for the first time in far too long. It just goes to show you that even people like me who take it as read that they constantly do everything possible to ensure Exetel buys at the lowest possible prices has been over paying by around $120,000 a year for some time.

....except when they don't.

I constantly get 'told' by a wide variety of people in a wide variety of circumstances that "you're only in business to make as much money as possible". I find it interesting that so many people who have read Exetel's articles of association in detail and , presumably read the monthly minutes of board meetings seemed to have failed to read the statements about why Exetel is in business on our web site or noticed that the pricing of every service offered by Exetel is lower than that of any other provider of a similar/identical service. I also wonder why so many people are stupid enough to make definitive statements on subjects they know nothing about - but that seems to be the prevailing condition of today's largely uneducated, 'sound bite informed' society.

Exetel is definitely planned and operated on the basis of constantly remaining profitable because if it wasn't it would quickly cease to exist. In that respect Exetel has made a small/very small profit in each year of its existence. However Exetel was 'created' to deliver any service it supplies at the lowest cost (consistent with the company remaining profitable) available in the Australian marketplace NOT to make as much money as possible for Exetel's owners. Once it became established in actually meeting its first objective the second objective of assisting some of the more threatened with extinction 'non-human' Australian residents survive was added to the company's objectives a little over two years ago by allocating approximately one third of those small profits to some community based projects dedicated to those objectives. Exetel's owners have worked in the business since it's first day of operation (putting in hours every day for almost six years that are unbelievably long by any standard) for salaries far below what they could realistically command working for any other company as part of keeping Exetel's service prices as low as possible.

I very much doubt that Exetel is 'unique' in being a company that is NOT set up and operated with the sole/major objective of making as much money for its shareholders as possible and why so many people have such a misconception is puzzling given the large number of charitable organisations and NFPOs that exist in almost every aspect of modern society. I don't regard Exetel as being somehow 'special' or deserving of any 'favourable' treatment by anyone because we choose to operate a 'business of our size' in such a way and that is certainly the case that we are not accorded any preferential treatment by our suppliers or our customers - if anything the reverse is the case in most instances. Operating a business at the lowest margins possible is much more difficult, in every way, than running a business at the highest margins possible - there is little, often no, room for many/any mistakes to be made that won't have quite severe, quite possibly 'fatal' consequences.

I don't know if Exetel could be a 'better' company if it charged more money for its services - I think the simple answer would be "yes" but then I can't see why Exetel would be in business if it just did the same as any number of other companies. While I have an adequate understanding of the concepts of capitalism and commerce and I also have a working knowledge of the concepts of 'free markets' and the role of competition in producing gargantuan wealth for many individuals such as Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch I have never related to those sorts of capabilities or ambitions....I think you need to come from a different background to mine or, of course, have infinitely more abilities. So, perhaps like most other people we are never going to 'achieve' anything like those sorts of successes and most of us will think it a reasonable achievement to have a few laughs each day, keep a roof over our own and those dependent on us heads and playing a part in bringing up our children to be decent and caring people and, for those of us who can manage it, not to be too much of an irritation to the societies we inhabit during our life time....by no means all of us are going to get to achieve even those modest ambitions 100% of our time.

So, while doubtless there are a majority of people who pursue a business career with the ambitions of emulating a Bill Gates or a Rupert Murdoch and there are some companies that pursue maximum profit above everything else there are others who, probably because of their inadequacies, have to aspire to more modest 'returns' from the time they put in to earning a living and, in my opinion, trying to do some sort of 'good' from pursuing the work of your choice is something that is worthwhile to do.

Perhaps that is the cop out of the untalented - but then we can't all be talented.

Maybe it's the constant weather changes and the prospect of a searing heat wave replacing the recent near record low temperatures in Sydney but my in box this morning seemed to contain more, and lengthier, criticisms of Exetel generally and me personally than I would normally receive in a couple of weeks rather than overnight on a Sunday. I have never developed the habit/ability to simply delete emails from addresses/senders I don't recognise always according someone who taken the trouble to write what looks like a good few hundred words the courtesy of reading at least the first paragraph. I do this well knowing that someone I don't know is not going to write so much unless it is some sort of rant that is not going to be of any value to me, or anyone else in Exetel, and that I will simply be wasting my time and that there will be no prospect of any reply I could take the time and trouble to write would have any likelihood of doing any good whatsoever to the party writing at such length about any subject under the sun.

I don't know about you but I've never assumed that a commercial company has ever been set up for the express purposes of screwing up any, let alone many or all, aspects of an end user's life - yet the underlying theme of each of the four emails I read earlier this morning carried that message indelibly clearly and the longest peroration reached 1,328 words to make sure the point was not lost on the reader. Why any of the writers would think that a 'senior manager' within such a company would then be anything other than delighted, rather than "ashamed" of achieving such a result (it would seem to fulfill the basic premise for operating the company) is also a mystery to me. I have also never understood why a customer of any company would think that a "senior manager" of a company that has "completely failed at every level to offer any form of acceptable service" would see any change by attempting to contact that company at yet another level.

I read each of the four emails for up to two paragraphs to ascertain that the writer was delusional and that I would not be able to provide anything more than had already been provided and deleted the arrant nonsense that had been written. It has always puzzled me that anyone, even if they are not very sensible or bright, would think that a torrent of abuse or a set of attempted scathing opinions of every aspect of a company or a person would elicit any response at all - other than in 'real life' a swift punch in the nose. Obviously the ability to rant at a screen allows a sufficient dis-connect from reality to make this possible for people of delicate mental balance.

On an average day I would respond to an average of well over 300 emails, forum posts and blog entries as well as speaking face to face with people who work with and who supply to Exetel. I, like any sensible "senior executive" have only one objective in interacting with people about business related issues and that is to help them with whatever it is they need my input to and by doing so help make Exetel a better company to work with or a better company to supply to. In the case of customers who post on our fora I always try to help them myself (seldom possible) and in the many cases I can't do that I ask someone else within Exetel to deal with their issue/question/problem. Pretty straight forward, straight out of the "supervision for the very young" manual I would have thought. Or as my maternal grandmother once told me "those who don't ask nicely don't get"......probably everyone's grandmother has told them that - at least once...with the few exceptions of the people who on occasions write emails to me on Sunday nights.

I can't understand why a person who has to write to the "Managing Director" about the total inadequacies of the services the company provides and the totally incompetent and uncaring people that are employed wouldn't figure out that those two situations could only exist if the "Managing Director" was equally totally incompetent and uncaring and that with totally inadequate services and totally uncaring and incompetent people the company couldn't possibly stay in business long enough for the writer of the email to get a reply - clearly the company is on the point of financial and operational collapse.

Up until about six or so months ago I often attempted to reply to the content of the sort of emails I received this morning but, with the occasional exception, my replies did no good whatsoever and, as I have often been told by other people within Exetel, simply made an impossible situation worse - so I have stopped replying to anything longer than the single paragraph that is required to write words to the effect "I'm sorry to bother you but I have a problem that apparently no-one else in your company can help me with - my ticket reference is XXXXXX." Strangely I don't get that sort of email.

We really must improve our services and replace all of our inadequate people with someone who can speak simple English and who understands the basic of ADSL....but then.......if the criticisms were true I wouldn't give a damn would I?