John Linton's Personal Musings

.......easily the most 'successful' in our short 'history'.

With less than 24 hours to go until 2010 gets under way we only have a few odds and ends to tidy up to ensure we are completely organised to try and get the most out of the 'dead' month of January having completed our best December since we began in business. It isn't just the various revenue and customer growth figures that have made 2009, and especially December, so satisfying but the overall development of the company in many different and very important ways. I imagine that when anyone starts up a business they have high hopes for its success and for those businesses that actually survive it must give their founders some considerable satisfaction in overcoming all the statistical odds that indicate that less than 5% of businesses that are started last beyond five years. So I should, as part of the 'start up' team that created Exetel be feeling very satisfied this morning with our achievements over the past six years - and I am - but not as much as I thought I would.....mainly because I think that 2010 will be a very, very difficult year for Exetel.

Some of the most satisfying things are the very real achievements of:

1) Having 5 of the first six people who started with Exetel still employed and at much more senior levels

2) Having more than 500 of our first 1,000 customers still using our services.

3) Never having borrowed one cent to grow our business - we paid cash for everything we needed

4) Not owing a cent to any supplier who has submitted an invoice more than seven days ago

5) Still doing (immensely more) business with the five main suppliers we started with

and, as I touched on in a previous musing, the development of a national 6 gbps network across 8 Australian PoPs, the successful set up of a 'bigger' company than Exetel Australia in Sri Lanka and contributing closing on $A1 million to the protection of endangered Australian animals, birds and plants are all 'achievements' that give a great deal of personal satisfaction - particularly as these achievements have been made while providing services to Australian individuals and businesses at much lower prices than any other, much longer established and much bigger, data communications supplier has done and is doing - and in constantly achieving that paramount objective of starting Exetel - I think we all get a great sense of not wasting our last six years.

So, undoubtedly, we will all in our different ways take some small amount of time today to reflect on the ups and downs, and there have been many downs over the last six years, of trying to deliver a constantly growing number of data and telephony services to a constantly growing number of customers while striving to achieve our three key company goals and hopefully we will 'dwell on' the ups rather than the downs.

Without our long term customers we wouldn't be in business today so, to those of you reading today's musing who are Exetel customers - thank you for helping us survive and grow - your support is the only reason we are still in business.

PS: If you want to put Exetel's donation programs in to perspective (where our directors take their own time to seek out community based projects and then send the money monthly while insisting on quarterly audits and visiting the projects to review progress first hand) make yourself very angry by reading this link sent to me a few moments ago:

http://www.news.com.au/business/cancer-charity-onlybrgives-away-4900/story-e6frfm1i-1225814275430

.........easy enough to to do for any sensible company's planner(s).........pity we don't have any.

Planning is a crucially important element of running any start up business
and continues to be the most important element of then running any small
business that manages to survive the start up phases and reaches the fifth and
subsequent year of operating. With two days to go before Exetel completes its
sixth year of operating a data communications business in Australia our
planning remains as inadequate as it has always been. Self evidently our
planning has been sufficient to have allowed us to have survived and to grow
over the past six years but equally self evidently it hasn't been remotely good
enough to have allowed us to take maximum, or anything close to maximum,
advantage of surviving longer than 95%+ of start up companies.

I briefly reviewed the Exetel current year operating plan with our CFO as I
do at the start of every business week and it continues to show that we are
'tracking' pretty much on or above our key objectives right across the
'spectrum' of our planned activities which is very reassuring as we complete
the first six months of the current financial year.....always the easiest to
achieve as, obviously, they are 'closer' to the end of the planning process
that established the targets than the second six months. However there are two
glaring problems with our planning that will impact our next six months efforts
if we don't resolve them very, very soon.....and they relate to the very
simplest of issues - lack of floor space which is made so much worse in a
planning sense because we moved in to our new Sydney premises on 1st June 2009
and we expanded our Sri Lankan premises on 1st August 2009! Score ZZZ for
planning for Exetel.

We can solve our Sri Lankan problem by simply renting more space although we
have only just completed the fit out of the additional space there - so we will
lose some money and have the inconvenience of re-locating within the same
building with all the hassles that entails. The Sydney problem can't be
addressed so easily. Firstly we have purchased the current floor in North
Sydney and secondly there is no floor space in the current building for rent
let alone for purchase.....so we will have to find additional space somewhere
else which gives us the inconveniences, if not problems, of running our
Australian business from two locations in the same city.....not any sort of
problem for a larger company but a pretty serious set of inconveniences for a
small company. So while the overall business is performing admirably in meeting
the targets set in June 2009 our ability to maintain that performance is now
very seriously threatened by the disruptions caused firstly by inadequate floor
space and then by the problems of moving 80% of our people in both countries to
new locations...a set of problems that we can well do without in what looks
like being a very difficult six month period.

The major aspect of this poor planning that deeply concerns me is the amount
of money we will have to commit both to the costs of moving as a one off but
more importantly the ongoing operating costs of double the floor space we
currently have and the associated operating costs. This would be difficult for
a small company in stable times but it is a quite different consideration in
very unpredictable times - particularly as we continue to move Exetel's
business foci so significantly. It is going to be very difficult for us.

I have no idea what we will do beyond the
obvious....we have to do something in both locations. We will need to make the
base parameter decisions within a few weeks and then plan to move all of the
Sri Lankan personnel and half to two thinrds of the North Sydney personnel
before the end of April. To me, that's a daunting set of tasks and time
commitments that now have to be fitted in to a period where we are already
severely stretched in terms of management planning time and resources. I
suppose that's what happens when you don't plan effectively.

A four day weekend at the end of the year followed after three working days by a three day weekend is a pleasant way of ending the year especially when Christmas Day falls on a Saturday. I suppose the downside is the shortest 'working week' in the year is available for all of the things you let slide leading up to Christmas....which, when I reviewed my 'to do list' this morning was a lot more than I thought.

This year was the first year that we had support and sales telephone and email and ticket answering services on Christmas Day and Boxing day as well as the intervening week end days and we have been recruiting in December to extend the weekend shifts to the full 8.30 am to 9.30 pm hours seven days a week which we will put in place before the end of January 2010 assuming everything goes to plan. All being well, we will extend support hours to 24 x 7 before the end of June 2010 as we move to providing a different range of services utilising Sri Lankan engineering personnel. We have never considered that ADSL residential users needed 24 x 7 service but as we will need 24 x 7 for other services it makes sense to offer that to ADSL users as well.

The main tasks to be completed over the next few days are the revisions to the business ADSL plan, the revisions to the wireless broadband plans and a re-look at the residential ADSL2 plans - plus agreeing the new business remuneration and commission plans and implementing the new caching services. We will also do some interviewing to hire the first 4 business sales trainees for January as well as tidying up some other personnel management and measurement issues. It doesn't sound that much when you spell it out in a sentence or two but there is a fair bit of work to be done in relatively few hours. Apart from the odd year or two, once a decade on average, I have always used the second half of December to ensure whatever I have been responsible for is as well prepared as it could be for the start of the new calendar year. I have noticed over a very long time that few people avail themselves of this time to work sensibly and I have always regarded that as a significant waste of opportunity....each to their own I suppose.

There are obviously more people than me who regard the last two weeks of December as being useful times to catch up with people who are difficult to reach at other times and I have received a 'deluge' of emails containing product and service offers and requests for meetings this week over the past 10 days. Apart from interviewing prospective sales trainees I have two appointments on each of the next three days and two conference phone calls to discuss 'opportunities'. Perhaps it's also a sign that business is tougher for some people at the moment than it has been in previous years though our December ADSL1 and ADSL2 sales will be up on December 2008 by over 20% and the combined ADSL1, ADSL2 and Wireless broadband sales will be up more than 50% on 2008 - so the likely toughness of the marketplaces isn't yet showing up in our figures.....but then I didn't expect the numbers to drop just yet....the first few months of 2010 may well be a totally different story when the current round of 'price adjustments' by the larger ISPs don't produce the required results and they start on round 2 of that unwinnable war for an increased residential ADSL market share.

The engineers and provisioning have a 'big' six months ahead of them re-dimensioning the network to match the changed objectives of the company and the delivery of new services in new areas and we have an equally challenging time in finding the right way of delivering wireless services as well as changing the emphasis on marketplaces to deliver very ambitious growth while ensuring our current customers continue to benefit from the likely downward movements in pricing across a range of services and products. I think the rush to offering unlimited residential ADSL2 (and perhaps ADSL1) will be an interesting process to watch unfold over the next three months.

Time to hit the road and make something happen.

PS: I am considering making this blog only accessible from Exetel IP ranges as it is primarily aimed at Exetel customers and it seems around the right time to do that. My main reason for making that change is that I'm unsure how much time I will have from now onwards to write a daily blog as I will switch my recording of the ups and downs of playing my part in running Exetel to a different medium which I think will be more useful in achieving the objectives that the blog methodology has partially achieved over the past year or so.

Like a lot of other people, it seems to me that this year has passed in a flash with almost no remembrance of what we were doing last January and with very little memory of what happened in the other months of 2009. I spent some time yesterday completing the final changes to the business plan for the last six months of the current financial year and have only got some minor details to complete. I, of course, don't have the final figures for December but we had already set new records in almost every aspect of our activities well before Christmas so the final figures will come as no surprise when we get them in mid-January. Both calendar year 2009 and the first half of financial year 2010 have been exceptional for Exetel and, though it might sound self congratulatory, we have managed a difficult twelve months very well both from our customers view points (we have lowered most service prices quite substantially) and we have made enough profit to increase our donations to endangered species by almost 50%. Achieving those two objectives for a sixth successive year is very satisfying - the fact that the business has continued to grow at a faster rate than that of the companies with which we compete in quite difficult times is also pleasing.

Looking at the 'master plan' that extends over a much longer period than twelve months we accomplished three of the major aspects of that 'wish list' which is more than we have ever managed to achieve before which is some sort of indication that the company is 'maturing'.

Possibly the most difficult achievement and certainly the longest time frame was the completion (as far as such a thing can ever be completed) of the transformation of the National network from a 'star' topology hubbed out of Sydney to a 'meshed' network of 8 'independent' PoPs with standalone capacities to connect both Telstra and Optus wire line and wireless customers (it is not yet possible to connect AAPT ADSL2 services 'locally'. This was accomplished late December and over the two and a half years it has taken us to make these changes the network has grown, in terms of bandwidth and routing power, by almost 300%. It has been a considerable engineering achievement over that time.

The second major long term achievement has been the establishment of Exetel Sri Lanka to handle all of Exetel's back end processes. This has taken us the best part of four years (counting our timid beginnings) but it has mainly been accomplished over the past two years and has involved almost everyone in the Australian company. By every sensible measurement Exetel now provides better provisioning, billing resolution, technical support, residential sales and programming services than we have done at any time of our existence. As we had zero knowledge or expertise in setting up such operations in a third world country when we decided to do it this is a particularly pleasing achievement.

The third major long term change has not been fully accomplished but 'all' of the difficult 'bits' were successfully put in place in 2009. This was the setting up of a corporate sales and support operation that would build exponentially on the painstaking and patient work we had put in over the previous five years in creating all the required back ground services required to build a business service revenue that would grow to be larger than our residential revenue over a two year period. In 2009 we hired the first 12 of the planned 48 sales people we plan to 'put in place' by December 2010 to provide services to medium/large to large business organisations. So far each one of the sales people we have hired have got through their very tough probationary period very quickly and have begun, jointly, to develop into a formidable sales force - as AAPT made the point to them - "in November you sold more services than AAPT Corporate in house sales teams and all AAPT's wholesale customers put together." Not bad for a group of people in their early 20s whose average experience of communications technologies was less than 4 months. 

So, Exetel has accomplished a great deal in 2009 which was not the easiest year we have experienced. Looking forward I think 2010 will be a lot more 'difficult' than 2009 in several ways.....and we will have to change Exetel even more next year than we did over the past 12 months - we will finish the details on how we plan to that by the end of the week.

........A New End Of The Beginning.

I have been disappointed with Exetel's lack of progress in meeting our, admittedly ambitious, wireless broadband sales over the last six months of 2009. Everything we have tried to do hasn't achieved anything like the results we had hoped for and we are in the process of changing our approaches and the markets we are targeting almost completely. I scanned through the carriers offerings yesterday after seeing yet another "half price" ad from '3' on television and saw the usual cut price promotions and 'free' offerings which have become the norm since early 2008 and have moved in stages over that two year period with prices continuing to fall and data allowances continuing to increase. Our buy prices, based on our very small volumes, haven't changed since we started offering a wireless broadband service so the 'tolerance' we have to produce "new" offers/bundles/promotions is very, very limited.

It will be interesting to see what the ABS statistics reveal about the growth, or otherwise, in the wireless broadband market when they publish their update some time early in 2010 and also what those statistics show about the wire line broadband market - particularly whether wireless broadband is eroding wire line broadband at the low end usage levels. Low end users, despite what anyone might gather from scanning the ISP pricing pages still, as far as I can see, account for 60% of all users - that's based on our user base which I am pretty certain is skewed towards higher end users. Our figures are irrelevant as we have such a tiny percentage of the total market but they are the only 'facts' I actually have - everything else (including the ABS survey results) is indicative but not precise.

Although, at least in terms of coverage, '3' is the least attractive of the wireless carriers this latest offer of a 'free' USB modem and 3 gbytes of data for $A15.00 a month is very, very attractive:

http://shop.three.com.au/broadband/Broadband-3GB#tbl_select_device?cmp=S0137

and it will be interesting to see what effect it has on the market which should be pretty easy to gauge - how long it takes for Vodafone to duplicate the offer using its own brand would be a pretty good indication of whether it is a success or not. I understand it is only for six months but then 3 gbytes for $A30.00 a month is still a very good price and the 'free' modem is also attractive. An effective offering of $A5.00 per gbyte sets a new low mark for wireless data and, even if it is for only six months (right now) it presumably is an indication of wireless price direction over 2010. The 'free' modem offers will become less attractive not only because a much higher percentage of notebooks and lap tops will have wireless chipsets built in but because with 3,000,000 or whatever the correct number is of USB modems already in the marketplace many wireless buyers will already have a modem or can easily obtain one for less than $A10.00 on eBay etc.

Telstra continues to push its coverage and higher theoretical speed as the reason people should pay more for less but I wonder how sustainable that position is as 2010 plays out - it seems more than possible that Telstra's pricing of wireless wil come under the same pressure as did its ADSL pricing - it became unsustainable having been pushed beyond the tolerance of even their least technically ware customers. Far too soon to tell but I think that even their business customers who get 'special' pricing will begin to find it just too expensive...so their may well be competition at the lower end of the pricing offers from Telstra for the first time...and they are a lover of "half price for now..." offers and Optus 'me toos' that.

So it's likely that some form of $A5-6 per gbyte will become the 'standard' wireless broadband offering between no and the end of February which will put even more pressure on the low end of the ADSL market (at least 50% of all ADSL users) not only because per gb it will be a better deal but because it continues the pressur already exerted by mobile telephones to get rid of the increasingly expensive telephone line completely - adding a further $A30.00 in to the cost savings for an increasing percentage of buyers. Although some ADSL users think high speed is the key driver of internet usage I very much doubt that's true. While there are a small percentage of "OMG my thieving downloads are taking forever" it is likely that their percentage is less than 10 - maybe far less than that. It is certainly true that more than 50% of Exetel's users would not download more than 2 gbytes per month and the AVERAGE download of our wireless users hovers around 1 gbyte per month.

I think '3' have picked it exactly right in selecting 3 gigabytes as the included data allowance and have been very brave with their $A15.00 pricing per month for that download. I think it will put the feline amongst the grey flying things in wireless broadband land as we enter the new years but, to mix metaphors, will only be the first shot fired in the re-ignited wireless broadband war.

We will now have to see what we can do to meet our even more ambitious 2010 wireless targets having failed so miserably in 2009.

....the actual legislation and constitution ensure that it can never operate effectively or get remotely close to what it is required by its own constitution to do....it's simply  a 'work for the dole' program gone feral.

Looks like the weather bureau has got it mostly right with its forecast for Sydney today with gray skies and continual rain showers where we are....the sort of very dull day that combined with yesterday's Christmas lunch and an over indulgence in alcohol didn't promote the thought of early rising and up and at it allowing the luxury of a late start to the day. Presumably that is causing more people to hunch over their computers and write to me rather than enjoying their break in the sun. I mentioned in a previous musing that Exetel had decided to take legal action against the TIO because of their total failure to act under the terms and conditions of their constitution and when this had been brought to their attention they just dismissed the claims by crediting the charges made on the examples provided with no agreement that the problem was endemic and that it needed addressing. This simple post has generated more than 200 emails to me over the past few days with 11 being written on Christmas Day so perhaps I should clarify Exetel's situation as I simply don't have the time to keep responding to each one individually.

Firstly, let me state that I have zero problem with the government of the day setting up some sort of 'independent body' to deal with claims of improper or disadvantageous behaviour by any industry sector. In the case of the government of the day's stupidity of setting up the TIO as an industry self regulating body (read self funding and self staffing run by Telstra) I have a major problem but living in Australia's "democracy" I regarded that idiocy as just one more burden made inevitable by the pigs with their snouts in the trough 'government' under which this country operates. I am not going to go into any detail here of the construction and methods of operation of the TIO but if you are interested please type TIO in to your search engine to disabuse yourself that the TIO is either a government organisation (which most of the people writing to me seem to think or a private corporation which the rest think) or read this - one of the more accurate summaries though a little out dated in data:

http://www.tio.com.au/TIOReview/Issuespaper.htm#5

which outlines the terms of a review of the TIO's operating standards in 2006 but gives a general reader a thorough explanation of the TIO and its operations. If you can't be bothered then a summary (that seems to be necessary as so few people who wrote to me seemed to understand the first thing about it) is:

1) The TIO is a telecommunications industry SELF REGULATING organisation that has an 8 person  board comprised of 5 representatives from the industry (2 from Telstra, 2 from Optus, 1 from Vodafone) with a further representative elected by the members of the TIO from the telcos, one elected by the ISPs and one nominated by the board itself).

2) The TIO has to generate its own funding for its existence (no government funding).

3) The TIO is to be continually assessed against nominated standards and processes

Since its inception Exetel has measured one aspect of its service performance against the number/levels complaints we receive from the TIO. As an ethical company we take that very seriously and the summary of TIO complaints is presented to the Exetel board on a monthly basis. Over the past 18 months we have noticed a steep escalation of the number of complaints the TIO receives across ALL TIO members but we are only concerned with that trend in how it affects Exetel. For over a year we have been investigating the TIO complaints in more and more detail as, irrespective of what we did, the inexorable increase continued.

Our investigations began to reveal why complaints were increasing and it had nothing to do with any aspect of support or other services provided by Exetel. In November 2008 we received an 'anonymous' letter from an alleged, then recently, ex TIO employee. I doubt that Exetel was the only ISP to receive the letter but being anonymous we had no opportunity of determining anything but what the letter contained. The letter made two points. The first was that all TIO employees had been instructed by 'management' to increase the number of complaints they received by making as many enquires as possible into complaints. The second statement was that as many level one complaints as possible were to be increased to level two complaints by simply changing the status after two days of being at level one. We had/have absolutely no ability to determine whether the letter had any sort of authenticity or whether it was simply mischievous nonsense. However any law suit would involve a discovery process and that would determine that matter.

What we did see, from that time onwards, was a steep increase in the number of level one complaints that were the sheerest nonsense (the customer's complaint didn't involve Exetel at all but "had been registered against Exetel because Exetel's name was mentioned" was not untypical even though we provided no service to the customer) but many others where Exetel could not possibly be involved in the customer's problem. Similarly we began to find increasing incidences where a level one complaint had barely been registered before it became a level two complaint (often on the same day) - fortunately we get very few level two complaints so these really stood out. But the reason for the steep increase was that the TIO simply ignored ALL of its legislated/constitutional requirements - in what looked like a pure need to generate funds.

Anonymous letters aside - it seems clear to at least me that the TIO employees are being directed to operate the TIO complaint handling process by their management in ways that completely breach the TIO constitution. It seems equally clear, to at least me, following their response to our recent letter of demand that they have no intention of operating the TIO within the regulations imposed by the legislation and the constitution. Having been cursorily rebuffed in our attempt to get the TIO to operate according to its constitution we have two choices. We can make the best of another Government screw up and simply add the costs of the TIO's employees gross ineptitude and its criminal management to our planned opex and forget about it - simple to do and, apparently, the attitude of the TIO's other 'forced' members. Or we can produce irrefutable evidence that the TIO is in breach of at least three of its constitutional requirements and allow the Federal court to rule on those contentions and what has to be done should our evidence be accepted.

We would submit that the TIO should be closed down, not because of its past actions but because it is manifestly impossible for it to operate as the legislation requires - if for no other reason than it could NEVER acquire the personnel capable of providing the services required by the legislation - in other words the legislation enacted could never be correctly implemented.

As a minor matter of principle we would also like all of the money back that the TIO has incorrectly collected from us by its criminal acts of stupidity, mental violence and blackmail and we'd like the perpetrators of those criminal acts to be jailed with no "Nuremberg" defences.

It is an 'open and shut case' based on the TIOs own documented (by themselves) actions and other subsequent documentation.

......and may the new year be the happiest, most fulfilling and productive of your life so far.

We finished up the year, those of us who hadn't left for a well earned vacation already, at lunch timish yesterday with a few glasses of champagne and some finger food with our diligent AAPT rep dropping in to pick up the last of the business service orders (AAPT must join the information age soon and not require actual signed paperwork to process simple agreements between a carrier and a wholesaler) - but it was nice to see her anyway. My last 'business' act was, on behalf of Exetel's board, to sign the contract to supply support to an environmentalist group in Sri Lanka to fund a far seeing new project to reduce the ongoing shooting of Elephants in that country.

I have talked about this ambitious project before in terms of how sensible it was in terms of 'third generation' species protection and how, if it is in fact possible to make it successful it will result in a much better chance for the survival of elephants in the wild and not just in Sri Lanka. The program is, in simple terms, to change the eons old practices of the villagers in remote country areas of Sri Lanka to reduce the conflict between them and the elephants in their competing needs to stay alive. This is proposed to be done by showing the villagers how, and then assisting them implement, changing from growing crops that are like the proverbial 'lolly shop' to an elephant (sugar cane, bananas and pineapples)  to modifying the soil's ph balance and constitution to grow sustainable grass for grazing dairy cattle so that when wild elephants are driven out of their natural habitats by clear fell logging and begin to starve they don't come across a banana plantation and satisfy their hunger by destroying a village's yearly income in the blink of an eye consigning the villagers from living in poverty to, literally, starving to death.

So the theory is that Elephants and the dairy cattle co-exist so will not be subject to stampede or panic of any kind and while elephants will eat grass if they are really hungry they only crop it and don't trample it to destruction (as with bananas etc). So the elephants might eat some of the grass but they will move on to look for something more palatable and not use their fabled memory to come back regularly to the 'lolly shop' for future sugar hits. In the mean time the villagers will remain protected by a few hectares of fields between them, their homes and the elephants and will not suffer destruction of their domicile or injury or loss of life.

The first two benefits of this scheme are that the elephants don't have any temptation to eat the crops and wreck the villages and therefore the villagers don't feel inclined to shoot the elephants as a matter of basic survival. Milk production also gives the village a daily revenue stream rather
than a yearly crop which is subject to failure, weather damage and elephant destruction. The third benefit is that Sri Lanka imports 75% of the milk its population consumes and is a very poor country in terms of foreign exchange so that if this pilot project works and is widely adopted it will address a third need which makes the country less dependent on other countries and will go some way to alleviating rural poverty across Sri Lanka as a side benefit from the program to reduce the shooting of elephants.

That's the plan and Exetel Sri Lanka will contribute $US300,000 over the next 30 months or so to allow dedicated conservationists in that country to attempt to bring this about.

So as undoubtedly all of us will eat too much today (me included) it may be vaguely comforting to know that by using an Exetel data or voice communication service (that hopefully costs you less than any equivalent service) you are part of the reason that almost $A500,000 will be given to various endangered species protection programs around Australia and this one in Sri Lanka in 2010 rather than lining the pockets of an ISP's shareholders and managers simply because there are data communications companies (at least one) that put profits a long way down the list of why they are in business.

Together we may not be able to 'save the planet' but we can make a much bigger contribution through Exetel's existence than we, or anyone we might know, can do as private individuals.

Have a great Christmas day with your family and/or friends.

......operating a small data communications company? Apparently an endless number of things relating to every aspect of everything you do.

Following a suggestion by our senior forum administrator (not an Exetel employee) we implemented a customer suggestion box in February of this year accessed from the Exetel User Facilities. Since that time we have averaged around 6 suggestions every day of things we should do to improve our services  - I am discounting the 'suggestions' that relate to some customers using the facility as a method of assistance with personal service issues. Our method of dealing with suggestions is that an Exetel director reads EVERY suggestion and either answers it themselves and then passes it to the manager in the company responsible for that area of the business to implement or answers it directly themselves as to why the suggestion cannot be implemented.

We used to keep a count of the number of suggestions we received and the number we actually implemented but I gave up maintaining that record when the numbers exceeded 1,000. I see no diminution in the number of suggestions being made after nine months and, if anything, they are increasing which leads me to the 'head line' of this musing - how can a sensibly run company over look so many good (and sometimes blatantly obvious) ideas for improving the way it operates? We would, generally as a group of people, think that we took a very pro-active approach to managing all aspects of Exetel and were constant innovators in terms of operating a technology based business but we come up with a tiny fraction of the detailed improvements to the business that our customers have done over the past 9 months - it makes you wonder how bad a shape the business would be in without the customer's inputs.....and, I suppose, how completely unfit we are to manage a business that needs so much 'tweaking' with no end in sight.

Prior to the suggestion box we used our customer forum to obtain customer feedback on improvements required and errors that needed to be corrected and the forum still generates a steady stream of very useful suggestions - though nothing like the volume from the suggestion box. Also our employees constantly made, and make, suggestions on how other parts of the company in which they are not directly involved can be improved but the sheer volume and breadth of processes covered by the suggestion box is quite stunning in comparison. I don't know what other data communications companies do in this regard - perhaps they don't have the huge number of short comings that we do?

In my early working days, in the early dawn of time,  IBM used to have 'plaques' with the single word "THINK" on them scattered around various walls in the offices, corridors and even car parks and fire stairs together with a formal employee suggestion program with boxes of suggestion forms in most offices whereby any employee could make a suggestion and send it to corporate head quarters where it would be read and reviewed and, if after whatever review processes were then extant it was accepted, IBM used to pay the employee a percentage of the revenue it generated or the costs it saved over a given period. Over any given year many, many hundreds of suggestions were 'published' in the employee newsletter and some of the employee rewards were very, very large - hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. It was a very successful program in its day but I don't know, whether having to have achieved operational perfection by now, whether or not it is still in use.

I suppose that one reason we get so many suggestions is that Exetel is still a very 'young' company and we keep adding new services and processes and constantly modifying our processes and procedures and that because so much of our internal and external processing is automated our own staff have far less visibility of the minutae of the actual processes than our customers do. But that wouldn't account for the huge imbalance of suggestions customers make to the suggestions we make ourselves. I am, in no way, complaining about this situation - I am deeply grateful that we implemented it - but I am concerned that the flow of suggestions shows no sign of diminishing even after we have made, at least 1,000 corrections in less than a year. I never thought it would be possible to survive in such a tough business while doing such a huge number of things wrong.

It's a sobering thought.

.....but this year there is very little sign of the "Christmas Slowdown".

In 'the good old days' Christmas in the communications industry started in late November and by "Christmas Week" the office was characterised by emptiness caused by people either formally away on leave or by 'running late' due to hangover recovery or shopping and other more important activities. In fact in the "bad old days" few people seemed to turn up at the office until well after 11 am and then only because they were arranging where to have lunch or escaping from wife driven home related tasks. Definitely not the case this year and, as my memory is increasingly unreliable, it may well not have been the case for many years.

Exetel has always been a far more dedicated company than the multinationals I have worked for where those memories of Christmas Past come from and, personally, I always found the December 'slow down' a period where you could take advantage of your competitor's slackness to make more sales because you had much less competition and if you put more effort in the rewards were greater than in other months simply because prospective buyers weren't getting any response from your competitors. I think it must be some measure of the tougher economic times, irrespective of what any 'financial expert' might be saying, that there are more people still trying to 'close deals' than in years past - or at least that's the feeling I am getting with even the larger of our 'prospective customers' still asking for meetings and, joyfully, still placing orders for business services at a 'normal' monthly rate. Our business sales teams having smashed the sales records for October and November are now within sight of doing the same for December by selling more than quadruple the number of business connections we sold last December - a great achievement if they make it.

Even more unusually I am still getting requests for 'meetings' from major suppliers who want to provide details of offers they are sure I will find attractive and it is absolutely in Exetel's best interests to consider what they will be able to tell us. So I met with one supplier yesterday and, surprisingly, I was very interested in what they had to offer to the point that we will almost certainly take advantage of what they are prepared to do for us in the new year. That 'result' encouraged me to arrange two more of such meetings today out of curiosity to see if similar benefits can be achieved. Perhaps things are much tougher than I had originally thought?....at least in some sectors of the communications marketplaces.

Our burning need, which yesterday's meeting partially addressed in an indirect way, is offering better wireless pricing to a number of different market sectors which we are having trouble achieving because we are not meeting our wireless service take up targets due to all sorts of reasons I never expected to encounter and therefore have not been able to achieve lower buy prices. We set the objective of modifying our wireless offerings by 1st January 2010 to 're-launch' our wireless marketing programs which will be based on much more effort in the corporate sectors, new 'country' pricing via our better country agents and a revamp of our 'city' offerings. We haven't made as much progress as we need to for these new targets to become a reality but at least, based on yesterday's meeting, we have a glimmer of hope in now improving our offerings by the 20% that we think is the minimum required for us to have a better chance this time around than the last time (when I made so many basic errors).

The other 'negotiations' which have 'sprung to life' are on international IP pricing which appear to be driven by the new/newer market entrants trying to establish a presence here. We are not a big enough buyer of IP to be of great interest but, for whatever reasons best known to themselves, at least two new suppliers are trying very hard to get us to buy from them.....I have no idea why. IP pricing now seems to be falling each quarter rather than the 6 - 9 monthly we have experienced in the past and this, while being very, very welcome, makes planning future IP purchases more complicated than at any previous time. We currently buy around 5 gbps of IP and we always thought that at some future time we might get to 10 gbps which would make it cost/effective for us to buy directly from SX and run our own end to end service across the Pacific. With the sort of pricing being hinted at now, that option seems to be receding in to the far rather than medium term future. However it does no harm to discuss such options.

So an unusually busy 'Christmas' week and it shows no sign of 'slowing down' with requests for meetings now extending right through next week. Something is different this year.

....according to Ronald Reagan are: "We're from the government and we're here to help". It is sad but true that democracy as a system of government has proven to be as useless a form of government as every other oppressive process that proceeded it and, as now defined in the countries that practice it, is simply a method of ensuring that the citizens of any country inflicted with this process are systematically raped and looted by a venal 'elite' called "major political parties" whose single objective is to 'obtain power' (they are so blatant they actually continually use those words) for the sole purpose of personally obtaining wealth and privilege paid for by the citizens of the country they 'govern' - "govern" in their terms being a synonym for extracting the most personal monetary gain from their 'term in power' in the shortest possible time.

In Australia it is very hard to find, since Federation, any person elected to Federal parliament who became a 'minister' who didn't leave politics incredibly more wealthy than he/she entered it. Given the quantum of the total remuneration paid to any individual during their 'parliamentary career' it is fortunate that the ATO is a 'government department' (controlled by a 'minister') because in what other way than bribery and its equivalents could any of these very average people, whose employment record before being given access to the 'trough' demonstrate a bare ability to make ends meet, have become 'millionaires' when they left?

......and then there are the even larger numbers of democracy's gift to increasing any country's levels of indolence, sub-mediocrity and sloth - "public servants" - one of democracy's quainter examples of twisted humour using the word "servant" to describe an uneducated and ill mannered pos whose only concept of 'public' is to attend a work place to use the computer and telephone facilities paid for by the Australian citizenry to deal with aspects of their personal life and whose concept of "service" is the frequent use of the 'hold' button on their telephone so they can reduce to an absolute minimum the interruptions from the "public" in doing that.

For all of my life I have accepted that "government" was an untouchable monolith that ruined various people's lives because it had the means to do so and possessed a universal attitude of uncaring and incompetence that made every Australian's life more miserable than it would be if none of them existed.....and that there was nothing any citizen could do about it. Doubtless that is still almost certainly true but I intend to at least try and do something about it because it has simply gone much too far and it makes me really angry that government drones can be allowed to carry out what I see as deliberate and systemic fraud.

Exetel is now going to take a court action to have the TIO closed as being a 'criminal' organisation based on a level of incompetence, lack of knowledge and unconstitutional actions that even Australian's, who are mostly as apathetic as the governments they tolerate, shouldn't have imposed on them.

I recently wrote to the TIO (on behalf of Exetel) giving them examples of how they routinely broke the rules of their constitution and requesting a commitment from them that they would cease acting unconstitutionally. I eventually received a reply (at the very end of the deadline) saying that in the five instances cited in my complaint that they had acted "incorrectly" in four instances and that they would "credit the charges" and in the 5th instance they believed the issue was correct (although the circumstances were identical to the other four - presumably they weren't prepared to admit 100% culpability).

It wasn't the point of my letter at all....though their admission that a minimum of 80% of the cases cited were in fact wrong actions is an indication that they didn't have a metaphorical 'leg to stand on'.

I had asked, using the five examples (and they were simply that - examples of what constantly happens NOT the only instances of this gross constitutional breach) for the TIO to give an assurance that it would thenceforth not continue to act as if it was a law unto itself with no obligation to instruct its employees to comply with the legislation under which it was set up. My concern was that the TIO (its personnel) continually acted in only one interest, irrespective of the facts, and that was to 'earn' as much revenue for itself and to maximise that revenue the TIO personnel were instructed to break the 'rules' under which their constitution required them to operate as a matter of course.

So we will now start proceedings against the TIO. The fact that the TIO could so casually dismiss the clear incidents of unconstitutional behaviour with a "so we screwed you over but, hey, now you are getting so uptight - here - we'll credit you for our wrong actions" response is quite breath taking. However they managed to screw themselves by admitting that in each of the incidents they had breached their own constitution and there are dozens more examples of that particular breach affecting Exetel and doubtless tens of thousands affecting other companies (although getting higher, I wonder why, the number of TIO complaints against Exetel is a tiny fraction of all TIO complaints).

Based on information I have been provided it will be interesting to see what a discovery process about the directions made to the personnel who are breaching the constitution turns up. Enough to have the TIO closed down? No-one will ever know until someone finally says:

"...but this is just plain wrong and a government simply can't do this."

...........is written and spoken so often it has de-generated from being a 'truism' (a self evident fact) to some sort of HR mantra that is meaningless.

Annette completed the semi annual personnel review for our Australian personnel using the processes we have used within Exetel almost from our first year. She had previously completed the Sri Lankan personnel reviews in late November. Exetel remains a small company with around 80 people but, even so, it takes a significant amount of time to meet with each person and discuss their various views on their current and future working satisfaction and their preferred directions. I was first introduced to these processes when I worked for IBM in the Old Stone Age when IBM still appeared to take this process at least semi-seriously (which, at least according to my daughter, is no longer the case) and have adhered to them ever since that time as I actually do believe, and always have, that they are beneficial for both the employee and the employer.

Annette, being a far gentler 'soul' (and an infinitely nicer person) than I have ever been is a sensible person to conduct these reviews and has a lot of experience carrying out these processes and she always takes whatever time each individual wants to take rather than trying to complete the process against some sort of rigid schedule. Apart from discussing and recording each individual's views on a fixed set of topics she also allows any person who wishes to speak about anything they believe is important either to themselves or to other people within the company. So, generally speaking, it remains a sensible and useful part of addressing issues and making sure that each person's future career direction is known and, wherever possible, accounted for in the company's business planning. We have been doing this, as I said, Since early in 2005 and it has, generally, produced quite positive results for the overwhelming majority of our personnel and has certainly significantly benefited the company.

The 'outputs' of this process is an individual review for each person, a list of individual employee 'wants' and another list of general points that need addressing in terms of the company generally. The individual employee's review is sent to them with a copy maintained on their personnel file and the two lists are sent to the (other) directors for consideration and then sent to the managers concerned with the various issues to address the points raised. It's a "neat" and "complete" look at the company's operations as seen through the eyes of each individual who works within the companies and (like the review of customer suggestions by a director) it helps complete the process of reviewing every aspect of the company's operations. Of course the 'downside' is that personnel, especially those very new to the company, may well not say anything negative that is affecting them and you get an incorrect 'skew' on how well things are going with some individuals and how happy (or not) some people, whole 'departments' are in extreme cases.

So in reviewing the summaries and often referring back to the individual reviews it takes a somewhat 'practised eye' to determine whether the words recorded are telling you the truth or are something else entirely. Like any 'survey' the answers to the 'questions' need some 'interpretation'. Annette will distribute the results of the reviews later today but we informally discussed them last night and then discussed what changes she had seen between this and the previous reviews. The results this time showed an overall increase in current job satisfaction with a similar increase in likely satisfaction with future positions and the time of 'promotion'. Similarly the level of current remuneration was, with two notable exceptions ("Exetel pays everyone badly"), also an increase. The one significant decrease was in the satisfaction with "management" - including from the managers themselves who almost 100% stated that they needed "more management training"....with one employee (not manager) stating the difficult to comprehend "Exetel has no idea of how to manage technical personnel" (this about a company that until 9 months ago ONLY had technical personnel with the exception of one sales person). That was very difficult to understand taken at face value.

Whatever small levels of success Exetel has achieved over the past six years has only been through our ability to first select exceptional people (more often people capable of becoming excellent) and then retaining them (eight of the first ten people we hired are still working at Exetel - two of those as our CFO and CIO eventually promoted to those positons from very junior positions at their time of joining). As I went through the individual reviews I was, again struck, by how lucky that Exetel was to have so many truly excellent people and how that 'simple' fact determines how well any company will actually perform over time.

Perhaps the truism with which I commenced this meandering should be changed to:

The ability to select people who are going to be excellent is a company's most valuable asset.

....and it isn't based on someone playing an old JPY single too loud next door.

I had trouble sleeping last night so I gave up trying and got up and watched the UK Premier League double header which saw Manchester field a very odd side at Craven Cottage (due to injury) and lose convincingly in the most lack lustre display I have ever seen them put in followed by a similarly hesitantly low key effort by Arsenal which fortunately went unpunished. I only mention this (not because I assume my lack of sleep is of any interest to anyone) but because the sloppy and hesitant performance of two incredibly good and consistently excellent football teams seemed to mirror my own hesitancy and lack of decisiveness lately - one of the reasons I couldn't sleep. So watching back to back really annoying soccer games didn't help.

As the protagonist in Fever Pitch once said at the end of that very funny book "I don't know whether life is crap because Arsenal's crap or whether Arsenal are crap because life is crap" but it was weirdly like that in the early hours of this morning - and it's OK - I know that really isn't the case. Life definitely isn't crap for either me or for Exetel at the moment and in many ways it's as good as either of them have ever been. We have had a really good six months in almost every aspect of the business and personally I have had a really enjoyable six months in every aspect of family interactions and personal pursuits. I am not, in any way, an alarmist and fearfulness of the unknown isn't something I have ever concerned myself with always assuming that I can deal with any circumstance that may present itself better than anyone else I have ever met - as a very senior manager at IBM once wrote in an annual review a very long time ago: "...not the best strategist in the company but he is easily the most brilliant tactician we have at the moment".

......and yet.....

I don't feel 'in my bones' that things are as good as any rational analysis of all the available figures says they are - and that is a feeling that is both disturbing and hard to get rid of. I can rationalise it away as all sensible people do - 'time of year', 'unsettled weather', 'upcoming break'...and as many other cliches as I could be bothered to list..but it is not any of those thongs nor is it all of those things in 'concert'. What I believe it could be is a fundamental change in many aspects of the telecommunications industry that no-one has consciously brought in to being and certainly no-one knows how they will play out. No, I haven't become a convert to 'New Age" stupidity and I very definitely am not an 'Old Age' "the end of the world is at hand" subscriber (all organised, or disorganised, religion to me is an affront to common sense).

Irrationally, or rationally depending on your point of view, I find it disturbing that Telstra should find themselves so radically revising their revenue forecasts downwards only five months in to the planning year. It is impossible for me to comprehend what could have happened in so short a period to necessitate such a radical downgrade. I don't give a damn about Telstra's results of themselves and, like many people in this industry probably are pleased that a monopolist can finally be reaping some minor reward for their bullying and over charging, but I am deeply concerned that they now see the rest of this financial year in such bleak terms. Obviously not because how it negatively affects Telstra but how it may affect Exetel. Perhaps it was Ross Gittins comments here:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/anaemia-diagnosis-wont-stall-recovery-20091218-l5rm.html

that sum up my equivocation. He makes the case that things are better in the economy than the bald statistics indicate and goes on to try and show why. I read, and then re-read, his logic as carefully as I'm capable of doing (which isn't that great) but the two Telstra articles in Saturday's Fin Review (pps 12 and 20) tell such a different story - why, if the economy is going to pick up would Telstra make such a goose of itself by unequivocally stating in public that it isn't going to from their perspective? I don't believe Telstra is 'crying wolf' and will then astound their shareholders by delivering the originally forecast revenue growth - that would be nonsensical with their half year results due to be delivered before the end of January which will presumably indicate what they are now fore shadowing....if those results don't do that then Telstra is going to do more than LOOK like a total goose.....they are going to get a pretty harshly worded 'please explain' from the ASX.

All of the other 'signs' I see from the larger Australian communications companies contribute to my uneasiness; from the almost hysterical levels of saturation advertising across every conceivable type of media to the knee jerk reactions observable just about everywhere. They are not signs of a set of companies achieving their planned objectives - to me, they appear to be demonstrating a whole series of companies not only not meeting their objectives but a whole lot of companies indicating they currently don't know how to re-set and then meet a new set of objectives. If that is the case then it is going to be very difficult to predict what is going to happen over the coming months - let alone how to deal with it.

I suppose that's why I couldn't sleep last night. Maybe being a better tactician than a strategist will be a bonus in such situations where so many strategies seem to be in disarray?

....according to Telstra in, presumably, preparing their shareholders (and market commentators) for their six monthly results early next year.....at least according to this short announcement yesterday morning:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/telstra-cuts-sales-forecast-20091218-l0ru.html

There is a slightly fuller version in today's AFR on page 12. Depending on how you count, Telstra makes up between 60% and 70% of the Australian communications market so you can be fairly certain that the overall market will grow less in the current financial year than it did in the last financial year simply because the dominant provider will not grow much if at all. Of course you could see that as a good indication that the rest of the market is picking up market share from Telstra but that wouldn't be likely given that Telstra has cut its prices on many services - either publicly or by non-published negotiation.

Irrespective of the lower than originally forecast revenue growth you will be comforted to know that Telstra will make even more profit than it did last year:

"The company said all other guidance measures remained unchanged, including .................... low single-digit growth in earnings before interest and tax.

I was worried when I first saw the headline that lower revenue would mean lower profits but that apparently isn't the case with Telstra making even more money out of providing the same amount of services than it did in the previous year. A 'trick' that its competitors would love to learn how to pull off year after year....but then they aren't monopolies so don't have the same overwhelming advantages.

Doubtless, as was seen from the recent 'pricing changes' Telstra introduced for its massively over priced wireless and wire line broadband services, Telstra will attempt to discomfort the smaller Australian communications providers by re-working the offered pricing for its various services thus causing a cascading 'deck chair re-arrangement' by the smaller providers......though that never seems to be the case (apart from Exetel of course) does it? Each of the "price reduction" announcements I have read so far actually don't include any "price reductions". In ADSL terms, every supplier has announced a "price reduction" has simply added some sort of download increase to its previous price points. As the price of downloads has tumbled at least 50% in the last 12 months such 'squirmings' are far from appropriate as the cost of providing ADSL services has very definitely fallen over the past 12 months....except this is not seen in any ISP's pricing (except for Exetel's where some middle/higher end prices have fallen by as much as $20.00 per month and the very low end prices have fallen by $A3.00 a month).

My perceptions may very well be wrong (despite the fact that I keep relatively 'sophisticated' records of the various ISP's price changes as I notice them) but the impression of desperate clinging to revenue/price points indicates across the industry revenue problems so far this year with no abilty to lower prices to protect/increase customer numbers as is done in so many other industries that face slow/no sales periods and deal with it by "massive discounts" Christmas, New Year, Spring, Easter, Summer etc, etc "sales". From clothing to cars - from books to liquor - it seems there never is a time when something isn't on sale - more usually many things.

Communications services, for the most part, aren't as volatile because Telstra 'owns the infrastructure' and is therefore indifferent to things like customer value; monopoly pricing is always based on "take it or leave it" which works just fine in growing markets but works less well in saturating markets or in markets where true competition exists - in Telstra's case only mobile telephone is a residential service they can't control via a monopoly presence and only mobile and data connections in the commercial marketplaces. Wire line telephony, ADSL1 and ADSL2 partly are all controlled by whatever Telstra wants to charge....which is fine (not really but it is an inevitability so you live with it) until the market is saturated and tougher economic times make even the 'ovine' segment of the marketplaces (the majority) more discerning in where their money's going.

Telstra's sales may be flattish and the signs from the frantic re-pricing of offerings by many other data and telephony service providers are indications that all is not as planned with their sales forecasts but we don't seem to be seeing that at Exetel. Our 'pure' ADSL orders are up 25% in every month of the current financial year (compared to the same months in 2008) and if you add in wireless broadband then our sales are up almost 50% over the ADSL sales in the same months in 2008. In business sales, and certainly because of the efforts we have put in our sales are up between 200% and 400% over the last six months as the efforts we have put in begin to 'bear fruit". Similarly most of our other services have grown between 50% and 100% in the same period. Obviously higher growth percentages are always easily achievable for small companies such as Exetel but we have certainly noticed no diminution in new sales over the period Telstra's announcement refers to....though we have noticed some changes in emphasis.

I was going to look at some of our pricing parameters over the week end but as I have been far from 'well' over the past week I think I'll excuse myself (with the exception of the necessary tidying up of the 1500/256 plans) on the basis that our results are tracking almost exactly as planned so why meddle with something that appears to be working (at least to our modest standards) just because Telstra and its copyists have some price issues with their customers at the moment?

.....one more example of Krudd's grandiloquent rhetoric resulting in long and expensive 'consultations' eventually resulting in money being spent (yours and mine) on completely useless non-outcomes......and I'm anything but "pro-child pornography"....being a father, relatively sane and a believer in "the Baader - Meinhof legal solution" to societal plagues.

So Labor has managed, after more than two years of nonsense to pluck up the courage to "honour" one of its election promises and try and convince that crazy Fielding to support their EFTS legislation and their other even crazier fantasies. When you actually look at Labor's record in government to date the only "election promise" they have kept is that they guaranteed to spend more money that the country had and they have met that well and truly....don't moan on about how they signed the Kyoto protocol....they did nothing about it except Krudd had one of his thousands of overseas trips for yet another 'photo op' and now Penny Wrong has been arguing about how useless the Kyoto protocol is ever since she hit the Copenhagen bars and night clubs.

Any way; back to the ludicrous Labor Mandated Filtering "election promise". Personally it matters absolutely nothing to me what this bunch of uneducated left wing lunatics proclaims or what they actually get to legislate. This is a democracy and enough of the population of Australia (including the majority of the people now complaining about it) voted to have this plethora of idiots and no hopers make decisions 'for the good of the Australian people'. So live with the results of your decisions to allow these useless morons to be elected and I hope you realise that they are bringing the same lack of education, knowledge and total lack of intellect to EVERY other subject and decision they are making 'for the good of the Australian people'.

This subject has been talk fested to death ever since it was raised and doesn't need any words from me to add to all that red faced indignation and ludicrous posturing based on nothing but any given writer's pig ignorance of facts, figures and democracy generally.

Three things only need to be remembered unless you possess the education of today's Australian educated 13 year old males (either by actually being 13 or being the mental and educational equivalent of a thirteen year old Australian educated male} and have therefore no ability to comprehend simple facts and political processes.

1) The filtering proposed by the Labor government will NOT in any way slow down any Australian user's ability to access the internet at the speeds and capabilities he/she did before any filtering is turned on....assuming that turns out to be the case.

2) In the event that any end user has any 'technical' (and I use that word in its loosest sense) knowledge about how to access the internet via any form of proxy then the filtering proposed to be used by the Labor government will not prevent any such user avoiding any filtering process at all with all IPs banned by the Labor government remaining as accessible as they were before filtering was turned on.

3) If you don't like what the Labor party has done then don't vote for it at the next election - people you vote for are clearly entitled to carry out what they stated they would do before you voted for them.

And that's it - there is nothing else - move on, this is not the legislation that is going to ruin your life or even slow down your theft of other people's property.

None of the loathsome slime that access and pass on child pornography will be in any way inconvenienced by this storm in a political tea cup and all that will happen is that the Labor government will waste a few more hundreds of millions of dollars of your and my money buying boxes from Scandinavia to proclaim another giant step forward in their delivery of enlightened government to the great Australian working families.

Just think about this waste (on a subject you can understand) and realise that the same uneducated lack of knowledge idiocy has gone in to every other decision these pig ignorant d***heads have made since those of you who voted for them gave them the keys to the tax income cash box.

So For Goodness Sake stop whining! You only have yourself to blame if you voted Labor at the last election and if you whine now and vote Labor at the next election then you really are the equivalent of an Australian educated 13 year old male......there is no reality in life for you......go back to "killing" images on your RPG in your darkened room and continue to pretend that 'reality' experienced by other people is in fact the alternate to that on your computer screen.....not the other way round.

.........but there appears to be no prospect of any abatement right through 2010.

I see that Internode has "listened" to their customers and announced a new set of ADSL plans. I think they didn't "listen to their customers" at all but did look at their churn aways over the last few months and and also noticed the lack of new sign ups and were 'forced' to attempt to stop the increasing level of customer loss and make an attempt to more closely match the plans of the suppliers to whom their customers were churning. Perfectly understandable and sensible business decision but no need to try and dress it up as "listening to customers" - Internode like the rest of the commercial ISPs ONLY 'listen' to their month on month new sign up/churn figures. Internode's plan changes just mirror the other changes currently being made by the other ISPs that are reliant on 'growth' in the ever more saturated ADSL marketplaces confront the realities of too few customers to meet too optimistic forecasts.....

....and the bad news is that it will only get worse as the various ISPs (from BigPond downward) get ever more desperate to meet the growth forecasts they have planned for and notified their shareholders to expect.......except, unless all the readings are wrong, it simply isn't going to happen.....because there is no growth to be had without significant price reductions and none of those companies appear to have ANY ability to reduce their prices from their 'comfort points' because of the devastation that will wreak across their current customer's revenue/profit generation on which their companies are dependent.....

and that's the REAL problem of 'umbrella' pricing 'strategies'. Each one of the 'leading' ISPs is completely dependent on retaining their current customer base AT THE CURRENT CUSTOMER SPEND LEVELS. They can't afford to actually reduce their prices - all they can do is to try and repackage the "PRICE" they charge at the moment to appear more attractive than their current prices currently do. So as they watch the stagnation/reduction of their customer numbers as their competitors try their 'Titanic deck chair shuffles' they try 're-packaging' in various ways but the one thing none of them can do is to reduce the charges to the customers....apart from being locked in to the growth forecasts they have made they are also locked in to the high operating cost levels that years of 'easy profit money' generated in a constantly growing market that would never stop growing.

I only briefly looked at the Internode changes but they seem, at first sight, just to be knee jerk, if not panic, reactions to the various changes made by Telstra and TPG. As far as I can notice iinet and iPrimus and, to an extent, AAPT have not, yet, made their contribution to the 'me tooism' by announcing their own new plan versions (inevitably at the same prices as they currently offer) but you would have to bet that would happen before Christmas or just in time for the 'new year'. Depending on the sales results these companies see by the end of February (when any obscuration by the 'festive season' downturn evaporates) I think it is highly likely that this 'beggar your neighbour' process will continue for the remainder of FY 2010 and then right through to next Christmas as even the most poorly prepared of the current 'major ISPs' confront the fact that ADSL is a saturated market where the price of even retaining their current customer levels will only be possible at the expense of their bottom lines - an even more unpalatable prospect than a falling 'market share.

Something different will have to be tried to make any difference - just raising download allowances at the same old price points won't achieve very much, if anything at all, in a market place where each of the providers offers the same service. Now that Telstra has been forced to move away from its starting plan inclusions of 200 megabytes to a meagre 2 gigabytes the rot has well and truly set in for cheating customers via huge excess charges and any ISP that copied that pernicious scam will have to replace that evil blood sucking income with 'real' money. Similarly the ability to add telephone line rental and, even more ridiculously priced, PSTN telephone call profits will continue to wither away as even the more timid of technology adopters embrace the savings of VoIP - so quite a problem confronting the 'umbrella' pricers.

Maybe innovation will have to be tried?......but that would require several qualities the large providers simply don't possess and they would need to find a way of breaking the titanium steel shackles of being locked in to their current sky high price points. Maybe it's time for true innovation?.......somehow I doubt that.

PS: Exetel's December ADSL orders are 25% up on December 2008 - for whatever that means.