John Linton
I took some time 'off' yesterday afternoon to consider what options we may have to increase the appeal of our HSPA services which we regard as an important future contributor to Exetel's viability in the future and that future that is closer than it was two years ago - if you'll excuse a Sybil Fawlty type expression. As with everything we have tried to do with HSPA since we embarked on the program more than three years ago everything we have tried to accomplish has taken much too long to put in place and much of what we originally set out to do is still in limbo. Perhaps I should take that as a sign that it's all too hard for a company of Exetel's size (so Mike, is that a better way of phrasing it?) to do and we should go back to simply re-selling some other entity's HSPA service - it would save a lot of time and constant disappointment? But, being the incredibly stubborn/stupid person that I am, I really don't see any point in doing that at all which, in turn, would mean that we really must find a sensible solution in the immediate future and stop 'messing about' round the edges.
Recently we made our 'largest' sale to date with a new business customer buying almost 100 of our most popular HSPA plans (and modems) for their reps to reduce the delays in placing orders while on the road - doing it 'on the spot' instead of when they next found a wifi service. It is an obvious application and one that my eldest daughter has been using for almost two years for her sales force and I am aware of several other sales forces using HSPA for their 'on the road' reps so it is likely to be widespread application type for all the 'bleedingly obvious' reasons. Why they didn't buy from someone else (bigger/more reliable/well known/etc) came down to the simple provision in the Exetel service of a static IP which apparently saved a lot of 'security' requirements without the need to write additional security into the application. That and our very low, 'real', prices.
So I took the time away from the office to go and see a company we had bid our HSPA services to almost a year ago for the same sort of application and lost the business to another provider because of "coverage/speed/big company support/etc" - all the things I would have actually agreed with at the time....and actually wrote to him saying I did. He was kind enough to contact me earlier in the week wanting to have a chat because, in his exact words - "well, in a nutshell, it hasn't turned out as we were hoping and we have abandoned the project". When we had a cup of coffee yesterday afternoon (his PA makes the very best coffee I have had in a very long time) he had a sad story to tell that basically was the exercise had ended up costing "ten times" (his exact words) what was budgeted for data and "twenty times" what had been budgeted for voice calls and the VPN problems were endless and weren't solved at the time they called a halt. He also said that the application implementation costs were now out somewhere past Alpha Centauri and his final comment was - "and then there's the billing nightmares and disputes we estimate we may eventually solve sometime next century".
So, in a useful and thoroughly good natured way, we went back over his original decision to ensure we were clear on why his very sensible decision criteria had proved to have delivered such a poor result. Our low key analysis decided that:
1) Any of the three mobile carrier's network would have been fine - he doesn't have any business outside the East Coast capital cities and major towns.
2) Buying through a carrier's re-seller was the major error as they had zero expertise in anything beyond taking his initial payments and shipping the sims and modems and could make no further contribution to anything including fixing the wrong plans they signed him up or resolving the billing issues that commenced from his first bill.
3) Turning to a third party systems integrator to take over the project once the error of dealing with a reseller had been determined provided no better result other than paying out a negotiated figure on the 300 sims/modems/plans he had originally paid for and then starting all over again with plans that weren't much better in terms of his needs.
4) The application really needed a static IP which while promised by the reseller and then again by the systems integrator was never going to be provided by the carrier.
The conclusion was that he needed to buy from a Layer 2 provider with both the ability and a lot of experience in 'tailoring' plans to meet the needs of specific requirements and who had all the back end abilities to actually deliver exactly what was required. Something he said he would do but it would take some time to get his CEO to listen to such a proposition as they had wasted so much money (over $300,000) and more importantly so much time getting nowhere for twelve months.
So it seems like an opportunity for a "company of Exetel's size" (and more importantly for a "company of Exetel's direct expertise and knowledge") to address a completely different segment of the HSPA marketplaces.
"Smaller" can be "Better" in some instances....in our case we have a huge amount of expertise in automation and VoIP and HSPA which goes way beyond what the carriers themselves can bring to bear in providing solutions to individual end business users and also more than larger companies than Exetel can provide.