Saturday, January 16. 2010Monopolies Are The Natural Order Of The Commercial World.....John Linton .....and anyone who thinks differently is doomed to perpetual disappointment.(Governments are the best examples of jealous monopolists - you can check that with Bob Lee or Jeff Davis if you have their emails) .......and the lion is never going to lie down with the lamb without pretty negative consequences for the lamb and similarly baby goats should always refuse any invitations to lie down with the neighbourhood leopard if they ever want to get up again. It will be interesting to read, if there ever is a chance to do so, what the 'review of Telstra's retail prices' comes up with - I would place a fairly large sum of money on nothing will change in any meaningful way - not that I am suggesting that there should be any change: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/telco-prices-under-watch/story-e6frfh4f-1225820136606er In the days, and it is so long ago I can't remember when it actually was, that I would actually try and understand Telstra's "wholesale policies" I was consistently bemused by the ability of a Telstra employee to tell you an outright lie to your face as to what Telstra actually sold services for and therefore their justification for charging Exetel so much more than they charged any single residential customer for the same service. This was, of course, after December (was it 2004?) when they actually dropped their ADVERTISED price for ADSL to BELOW their published on the web WHOLESALE prices and the ACCC had a slam dunk case for forcing Telstra to, a year later, actually reducing the wholesale price and, forever after, move to a new pricing/selling policy. Their new (protect us from the ACCC and those parasitic wholesale customers) methodology was essentially 'publish' a retail price on their web site so they could say to the ACCC "see our retail price is much higher than our wholesale price" and then use Salmat et alia to send out letters to various target end users, or send door to door 'representatives' or simply phone offering pricing that was way below wholesale. This allowed them to reply to any ACCC (or wholesale customer) enquiry with "look at the web site - stupid" and dismiss questions (that in my case cited the actual letter with its Telstra reference number) with "oh - that's just a one off promotion with many conditions"). So the ACCC is useless in that sort of scenario. That's the way a monopoly gets to act and no-one who knows they are dealing with a monopoly has any reason to complain about it - and I'm not complaining and never have. If you know something and decide that you will ignore facts and burble on about fairness and unfairness then, at least mentally, you never got past the age of 15 and shouldn't be involved in the actual world. The whole concept of Krudds lies about the NBN2 (ONLY spoken in an attempt to make the dumber Labor supporters forget about his previous lies about the NBN1) is that monopolies are created because they are the only way to get very expensive things done. Having created a monopoly it is almost impossible to limit its monopoly practices - simply because you can seldom find a real way of doing that and because a commercial return has to be made on the investment. Alternatively.... ....we could play "lets pretend" and pretend that Krudd has done a feasibility study that has established that there is enough demand for the use of an NBN2 and that he has had the build costs and time frames audited by someone competent to do that and had established that such a service could be built at an affordable price and then sold to an end user at a price acceptable to an end user and that delivers a commercial profit to the investor and any subsequent owner of the NBN2. Yes I know - it's pure fantasy but that's Krudd - long on 'vision' - very short on delivery. So there you have a very, very expensive infrastructure with some sort of percentage of possible end users signed up to it...owned by.....the government...oops.....back to 1906 and the fiasco of a government owned monopoly that charges what its drone employees force it to for basic services that the end users don't want to pay but because the NBN2 management and employees want top salaries without doing any real work operating costs keep going up and those are the charges for the only service available. (all that nasty copper and those other DLSAMs are just rusting land fill now) I can't immediately bring it mind but there was a similar situation in Australia in the not too distant past where the Government of the day (I think it was a Labor government) tried to break up a government owned monopoly because it charged ludicrously high prices for pathetic services and by breaking its monopoly true competition would produce better services at much lower prices. Any fool could have told them that was impossible but I think they went and tried to do it anyway. Does anyone remember how successful that was? Never mind - I'm sure that Krudd, being an expert on every subject under the sun, will make no apologies to Australian working families for not making any of the mistakes possibly made by his predecessors. Why a government is required to build a commercial enterprise at all remains a mystery but then that's Kruddism for you - all promise based on getting re-elected and no delivery. If there was a demand for a fibre network in Australia it would have already been built - wait a minute - there is a demand (at least in Sydney and Mebourne) and fibre is currently available to millions of users and presumably the suppliers of those networks are making money. So why didn't they build it out to XX% of rural Australia - oh simple - because it couldn't be done profitably. But wait - didn't Telstra say it was going to build fibre out to 98% of Australians for $A5 billion....yes....but only if they could restrict access to themlelves and therefore claw back their 100% monopoly. Oh - I remember now - but isn't the NBN2 a monopoly which Telstra will end up controlling? - well, yes - but we've got Krudd's word that Telstra will have to sell to other companies on a strictly wholesale model so that won't happen again. There definitely wont be an NBN2 list wholesale price and then Telstra making special "limited" offers to various end user demographics at below that price....which are usually their wholesale customers customers..... by co-incidence.
No of course not. You can be sure a brilliant mind like Krudd's coupled with his amazing breadth of knowledge of the communications industry and of commercial processes and practices generally (remember all of the experience he has in commerce?) coupled with Telstra's long track record of probity and fair dealing in the separation of retail and wholesale interests will ensure a great outcome for everyone. On second thoughts - lets not play "lets pretend" - I have a pretty vivid imagination but it can't stretch remotely that far. Friday, January 15. 2010Providing Perfect Support......John Linton
We have spent a considerable amount of time reviewing our support processes over the past three months against the targets set and are generally happy with the improvements. Answer times for 'support' have continued to fall and we are 'in sight' of the current objective of answering any support call within an average of two minutes during the extended support telephone answering times which will be a very significant achievement. Similarly sales answer average answer times have reduced and are getting closer to the two minute average which is the current target. Provisioning support remains at an average close to 20 seconds. Steve will go to Colombo this weekend to continue the 'quality' review of the support and sales processes which are harder to measure but which are more important than the logistical processes. We have continued to slowly build the number of personnel we have in Sri Lanka and are now approaching 50 people - if you care to you can see the 'faces' and qualifications of the people employed by going here: http://www.exetel.com.au/staff-sl.php One thing you might notice is the very high level of qualifications practically all the support personnel have which follows the previous Exetel Australian standard of only having IT degree/diploma qualified personnel providing technical support to Exetel customers - something that is, as far as I know, highly unusual (possibly unique) in support operations around the world. The Australian personnel and their qualifications can be seen here: http://www.exetel.com.au/staff.php The main reason that we made the decision to move support to Sri Lanka was the impossibility of retaining degree qualified people to work in support positions in Australia for long enough periods for them to become truly useful as they all wanted to 'progress their careers' faster than we could provide those opportunities and they regarded 'support' as an 'entry level' position rather than the career it can be for people who wish to do that. We could solve this problem in Sri Lanka by paying our support personnel so well that they are happier to spend longer in support and therefore becoming more knowledgeable which meant that we could solve the problem of continuing knowledge loss as competent support personnel move to other positions either with Exetel or with another company. We also could pay 2 - 3 times more than other multi-national companies because we didn't want the problem of training people and then have them leave for more money elsewhere. This approach could not be done in Australia because we couldn't afford to pay help desk engineers $A90,000 a year in their first year as a support person....but you should be able to guess at what 'quality' of graduate you could get if you did that. So providing support from Sri Lanka gives Exetel the opportunity of hiring a much higher qualified level of support engineer and, in theory, retaining their services for longer and therefore being able to have a much higher standard of person at the end of a telephone line or replying to an email in Sri Lanka than could ever be possible in Australia. The key issue is one of training and rapidly increasing each individual's in depth knowledge of not only the systems within Exetel but the vagaries of the different broad band and other services in Australia - particularly the differences between the various carriers that Exetel uses. We are slowly developing better ways of doing this than we ever had in Australia but it is a never ending task and we have a very long way to go....almost certainly for ever. We are gradually extending the support hours provided to Australian end users and before the end of this financial year expect to provide telephone and email support 24 x 7 x 12 with 2 minute or less average answer times. The ongoing issue will be the retention of highly trained people and the constant improvement in transferring knowledge to new employees which we are now working on in several innovative ways. Provision of support and other services from Sri Lanka has come a long way since we first made a decision to try and make this happen four years ago and the speed of development has increased much more rapidly since we opened our offices there some 18 months ago.Interestingly our first two Sri Lankan personnel will reach the fourth anniversary of their employment with us in a few weeks time. Our major issue now is to work out discretely measurable ways of measuring the quality of the service we provide to Australian customers on an ongoing basis. While perfection may not ever be possible to achieve it is going to be very interesting to see how close we can get to it. Thursday, January 14. 2010Wireless Broadband - As "Unworrying" To The NBN2.......John Linton
I was thinking about the ACMA numbers I cited yesterday in this article: http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_312017 and considered what the ABS figures would show for the period ended 31/12/09 when they get around to producing them (as far as I know they haven't yet asked for the data for that six month period yet - but I could be wrong). The ACMA data is already six months old and is only the ABS data published in a slightly different form so is not helpful in adding to the knowledge of the wireless and other markets. As far as I can tell from various public comments by Telstra and 'private' comments by Optus and Vodafone their wireless take up was much faster over the last six months of 2009 than the 162% reported by ACMA for the previous twelve months with Telstra saying it now had over 2 million wireless connections and the vaguer comments by the other two carriers indicating that the total of wireless connections must be approaching 3 million which, if true, is an extraordinary technology take up rate - by far the fastest Australia has ever seen. Exetel's wireless broadband sales are running at around 300% of what they were in January 2009 but that is from a very small base so is no of any significance to 'trends'. Wireless broadband for me is like VoIP - I don't even consider what I am using when I use my notebook just as I don't give a second thought to the fact that my calls to and from Exetel's offices in North Sydney and Colombo, to and from my mobile and to and from my home are all VoIP. It's just technology that I use to do my work and provides information about whatever I need at any time. I don't think the speed I get (around 1.5 mbps) or the cost of $20 or so dollars a month is any sort of issue for my business and personal use and I think that view is held by a larger and larger percentage of broadband users.....at least the information published seems to indicate that's the case. Which leads me to wonder how typical, or untypical, I am in terms of internet use. As an Exetel user I am definitely in the lower 50% of down loaders who don't down load video content from the web and don't play on line games. But I am, as are the other 50% of Exetel's users, a person whose internet uses aren't going to change dramatically over the next few years - I will remain a mainly business user with some leisure use all of which is non-video and not even audio. I suspect that apart from teenagers (whose internet is paid for by their parents) and 10% - 20% or so of the adult population most internet users neither need higher speeds than wireless does and will deliver nor do they need more downloads than are and will be affordable. They will buy at a price point that suits their individual life circumstances with the continuing major consideration being 'affordable cost' (whatever that means in each individual's then current circumstances). If these suppositions are anything like correct then it's going to be a pretty hard sell for ANY broadband service over $50.00 a month because wireless is already demonstrating that unless you need high downloads then the widening gap between the cost of wireless and the cost of wire line broadband services is beginning to become more and more apparent. The NBN2 was dreamed up by a total wanker (Krudd) who had and has less than zero knowledge about telecommunications based on summary/key point 'briefing papers' done on the fly by pretty average civil servants. 'Listening' to the frantic rationalisations since the announcement that "no Australian working family will live without 100 mbps internet by the next date I come up with" it has become apparent that the people trying to justify the need for an NBN2 (at any cost let alone at an affordable one) are fumbling in denial that mobile telephony (will remove the need for any sort of telephone service other than mobile for the overwhelming majority of users) and that wireless internet will meet the needs of some very large percentage of current ADSL users leaving the 'market' for a super fast service with a much less number of likely subscribers than even the most pessimistic of real people would have estimated. There's no point in maundering on about needs for high speed medical services and the like - they can be, and already have been, delivered by commercial fibre. No point in saying 'cost/benefit' of a combined residential data/telephony service - a rapidly growing number of people no longer use a fixed connection for their telephone calls and won't go back to one. No point in trying to say that on demand video will become universal - it already is and the studios, and Rupert Murdoch determine who delivers their content not a moon faced moron in the far away Southern Oceans trying to get himself re-elected to an insignificant sinecure in an insignificant country. Krudd is playing the Kevin Costner part in his very own version of Field Of Dreams (build an NBN2 and they will come!!!). I think his problem is that he's mistaking that stream of lights coming up Parliament Hill as headlights of cars bearing punters coming to fill the bleachers rather than the torches of the peasants from quite another movie coming to burn him and his pretentious posturing to death. The current apparent plateauing of ADSL, or even its decline, is an indication clearer than any Krudd nonsense that the new primary driver for data is mobility not download speed or download allowance - at least it is for a growing number of internet users who will be unlikely to ever consider an NBN2. Wednesday, January 13. 2010A Record Order Day In January Is Unheard Of.........John Linton ....but when that January record, albeit by the slimmest of margins, is broken the following day.......you have to consider just how wrong your assessments of the ADSL marketplaces really are. Then again the main premise we used in determining 2010 ADSL numbers was that the ADSL market had stagnated and will decline is borne out in today's press: Perhaps my ability to read the most obvious signs have atrophied so much over the past years, or perhaps I just never had any, either of which might as well be the case as I certainly haven't considered that Exetel's ADSL sales would increase over 2010 - I thought they would grow very slowly in net add terms but if the current level of order in takes continue then I might as well ditch the current recently revised operating plan and use one of Krudd's spare bus tickets to run Exetel......if that estimate can be wrong after six years what else have we got badly wrong? Being 70% out in your estimate of sales of two major services is a level of error that I have never made in my life and while it is only a very short period it's so wrong there is no basis for re-assessing what the future figures should be. We had our monthly board meeting yesterday and I briefly mentioned the problem but had nothing to contribute as to what the causes may be or what the current surge meant in terms of the balance of this financial year or even the balance of this month and that was before yesterday's orders were higher than the day before. I suppose, if you look on the bright side, it means that we don't have to put any effort in to constantly monitoring the ADSL markets as we can assume that even if we did nothing for the next five and a half months ADSL sales would meet the modest targets we have set for them in the current version of the plan. We don't have any 'inventory ramifications', and because our purchase volumes are so small we don't have any worries concerning the capacity of our suppliers to deliver the services and as our provisioning and delivery processes are automated we don't have any personnel increase issues. Increasing support numbers in Colombo at an increased rate was already agreed last November and is being implemented and can be implemented at a faster rate at any time so the end result of a much more rapid increase in new customers would pose no problems were it to continue. So, if you took that view, 2010 looks like being a piece of cake with the major concern addressed before most people have even got back to work - well done us. Then again there's the 'dark' side. If Exetel's minor and limited actions can produce a 70% order increase what could the actions of a Telstra or an Optus do? Or even a TPG if I am wrong in my assessment that they have no more room to move given their over riding need to maintain a level of profitability that is difficult already and their innate inefficiencies and over staffing are sea anchors to their future progress? A 70% increase in Telstra's order intake would certainly change the face of ADSL delivery in Australia and there is nothing that any other provider could do about it as it would take so many customers away from their current suppliers every month which would mean that in one year no other supplier would have much of a base left at all and long before that their companies would have collapsed as they couldn't cope with the loss of profit which is 'mortgaged' against their DSLAM repayments. Of course that won't happen but it does serve as a reminder that all of the current ADSL providers will have to do something to their current pricing offers if for no other reason than if one large company does something the domino effect is likely to be pronounced. In any event there has never been even a three month period in the last six years when some pricing change does not occur in the ADSL marketplaces and its very unlikely that there will be one over the next month or so.....but which major company will do that and will they be able to do it in a way that will allow them to attract new customers without butchering the profits they are currently gouging out of their current customers. It's a fascinating scenario. Psssst; wanna buy a cheap ADSL2 DSLAM? Only one owner - hardly any ports used - owner must sell.
Tuesday, January 12. 2010Hmmmmm....Maybe We've 'Over Done' The Price Revisions?....John Linton .....based on the fact that new/churn ADSL applications are running at 70% over the same period in 2009 and yesterday set a new order intake record - unheard of in January - at least it is for us. I'm not complaining in any way other than to wonder what is actually happening in the ADSL market places that we address and why the recent changes should have, apparently, had such a dramatic effect on our order intakes when similar changes in the past six years haven't had anything like the impact - except for when we first 'launched' the ADSL residential service in late January 2004. It is, of course, only ten days of a usually 'quiet period' but the trend line is clearly upwards and follows a record December. It is also a contradiction to our estimations and planning that we would struggle to maintain our current order levels and would expect our churn away levels to substantially increase as the 'marketing' efforts of the large suppliers increased over the coming year - perhaps, being the unimaginative people they always appear to be they 'turn off' their marketing in this 'quiet period of the year' and will only resume them later in January? I suppose it could be that we made our new plans too attractive in the expectation that the 'saturation' of the ADSL market apparently demonstrated in the August 2009 ABS figures and the comments by Telstra that their ADSL customer numbers were reducing (albeit very slightly) clearly signaled that the ADSL business was not going to grow any more. I, personally, took the panicky double change by TPG of its key ADSL offering in October then again a few weeks later in November to be a more obvious sign that their high growth rate had been severely impacted at the 40/40 level and that if TPG's customer growth had been impacted given their price attractiveness and saturation advertising then significant, downward, changes were almost certainly being experienced across the whole spectrum of ADSL price points, marketplaces and supplier order intakes. Then again it could just be a short term aberration and the balance of January will go back to previous order levels. I will be more interested than usual to see the half yearly announcements by Telstra, Optus and TPG to get some real idea about what is happening in their marketplaces and to see just how "flat" "flattish" is in Telstra's figures. If the half yearly reports are '"flattish" or worse it will be interesting to see what the companies most affected by any real saturation in the ADSL market do about it. Some current suppliers are more dependent than others on the "strong growth" they predicted in their last annual reports and at least one or two are very dependent on meeting their forecasts. Exetel, being the size it is, is always dependent on meeting our forecasts though we don't have the public pressure of having a listed company with shareholders who have a deep interest in receiving the expected dividends and gaining the comfort of the company growing in all important respects....particularly profits and market share. One of Exetel's two major advantages that allows it to compete with far larger companies and to continue to offer lower prices than companies with far lower 'cost of service prices' is that we don't have to make much profit - enough to fund our capital purchases and our endangered wildlife protection programs - that takes care of wiping out the financial disadvantage under which we operate and the other major advantage is our level of automation which reduces our operating costs to way below that of any competitor. At least that's what we believe and over the past six years we have been able to remain in business while selling services at costs continually below any other provider in Australia.....which has allowed us to continually reduce our prices over the period of our existence including so substantially reducing them from December 1st through January 1st that has, apparently, produced the dramatic increase in new orders. Perhaps we've finally reached a size where our twin operating advantages are being complemented by a buying 'power' sufficient to cut the 'buy cost discrepancy' between us and the much larger competitors to a level where they now have no ABILTY to reduce their prices (they never had any DESIRE to reduce their prices) because of their basic operating inefficiencies and their need to produce enough profits to meet their shareholders demands? It will be an interesting few weeks. Monday, January 11. 2010When Feeling As Jaded As I Am Lately..........John Linton .....it's always good to come across a sensible person's view how the things that really bug me at the moment are not just my personal aberrations: I have read various treatises written by Lanier over the years and even attended a seminar at which he was a key speaker a long time ago. The article is not long and if you have a minute or two it's worth reading. It addresses a number of points including the current defenses of stealing intellectual property from someone who once promoted the ideas and 'philosophies' that led to the current situation - as he says at one point the 'sharing of intellectual property' is turning everyone in to a peasant. One of his insights is what is the inevitable result of internet theft: "Unfortunately, we were also making another decision at the same On the one hand we want to avoid physical work and instead benefit and "Youthful fascination with collectivism is in part simply a way to This is all harmless enough, but the pattern can be manipulated in I think part, possibly a large part, of my current lack of enthusiasm for what I am doing, and have been doing, for the past ten or so years is the pointlessness of spending the declining years of your business life making it easier and cheaper for tens of thousands (in Exetel's case alone) of people to steal other people's property rather than reducing the amount of money they need to pay to get access to the most valuable source of information for their personal and business lives that has ever existed. It's a matter of perspective but somehow I've allowed my personal perspective to become clouded by the deluge of nonsense I read every day in carrying out the tasks needed to operate a business of Exetel's size. I realise that the only way of getting rid of this lassitude is to do something different but that's not a simple as just doing it because of the inter twined obligations that have been created in believing that what we have been doing for the past six is good and a useful contribution to the current society in which we live. Somewhere else in the article Lanier comments that "poverty trickles up not down" which I have always observed to be true in many aspects of the societies in which I lived and as I noticed it I became more and more obvious to me why 'socialism' was just a way of reducing human societies to mediocrity and eventually oblivion as 'history demonstrates over the past 5,000 years. Taxing the "haves" to provide for the "have nots" only has one conclusion - it eventually produces a society where there are no "haves" and the "have nots" have no source of future sustenance. I have little doubt that today's collective denial that internet downloading of intellectual property is theft is simply a symptom of many societies around the world today where has become the dominant view of the way of living life. "I want = I take - because I can". I sometimes think that providing internet is like dealing drugs - you are illegally profiting from the weaker minded's need for a substance they will abuse and you take their money although you know it's harmful and possibly fatal. People can only take other people's property without retribution in a society where morality/ethics are simply words in a dictionary in a society that is heading South towards an ever closer end date. Krudd panders to this societal decline in the most overt example of a politician whose only objective is to keep his nose in the trough for as long as possible - he is the worst example yet of a 'collectivist' who could create an "ideas summit" as an indication of how little idea he had in being the prime minister of Australia.
Sunday, January 10. 2010In Two Plus Years What Has Krudd Accomplished.........John Linton other than dramatically increasing his air miles and losing half of his hair? I assume the coalition parties have kept track of Krudd's lying statements he used to win the last election based on the strategy of "I will do whatever John Howard will do except I'm a nicer person". All I can see he's done is to replace the "dramatically bad for working families" Work Choices industrial legislation with something that is nearly identical. Of course he has also "apologised" to numerous groups of people whose demographics I can't remember while setting a new record for also saying "and I make no apology" more times in any given week than anyone has ever done in any given year before....perhaps he should have combined his approaches by saying "I make no apologies for making this apology"? He "signed Kyoto" and then did less than the Howard government did in terms of its requirements without "signing Kyoto" and I doubt more than one in ten thousand Australians even knew at the time what "signing Kyoto" meant - it meant absolutely nothing. He also ran an "Ideas Summit" notable for the fact that it produced no ideas and set a new low for describing a collection of fruit loops meeting under the direction of a collection of vacuous air heads by the word "summit". I suppose it also demonstrated that Krudd had even less ideas than that group of mindless morons whose ideas of an "idea" made the long term inhabitants of "Lubyanka On Sussex" look less criminal and dishonest than usual for a month or so. Peter Garrett (Minister for the destruction of the environment), single handedly, demonstrated that being a pop singer who had abused various substances for a decade or so didn't actually qualify you to do anything but daze away your life only doing harm to yourself and courtesy of the Labor party managed to do more destruction to Australia's environment in the shortest space of time than had been done since the 'invention' of clear felling. The graceless and constantly grating (does that woman ever shut up?) La Guillotine, whose constant screeching vocalisations have broken more sound systems than a defective Van Halen CD, has had three hair, make up and dress sense reconstructions (if such a description can be applied to Ms Gillards or her retinue's choice of clothing for her) that even a dumb male like me can notice over the past 18 months but her elocution teachers have failed miserably and her mispronunciations of common words (we are still apparently ruled by a "gubmant") are still delivered in her octave cracking impersonation of Megascops asio but lacking the more melodious nature of that much maligned bird's utterances. Then of course (I don't have time today to address the unending stupidities of Pippa Rocks In Her Head, Penny Wrong, Whine Swansong et alia) there's Stupid Stephen who, for whatever reason, is still Minister For Broad Brush Communications and Destroying The Economy - presumably because Krudd desperately needs a fall guy for the wrath about to be visited on him. Now while you might rightly say it is unreasonable to give a mental midget like Stupid Stephen the 'management' of Australian Communications you have to remember that the Labor Party is so bereft of talent it gave the Defence Portfolio (the apparatus that decides to go to war with random countries and which deals with the most corrupt people on the planet after Cambodian war lords or a NSW Labor MP - US and EU arms dealers) to someone who left school at 15 and spent his subsequent years in a union....so no surprises with the SS appointment. So Stupid Stephen gets to tell Australians why internet filtering is a good idea (guaranteed to keep every 14 year old male internet user at their most mindlessly hysterical) and he also gets to screw Telstra (and every other communications company in Australia) for no reason other than Krudd has to be got off the hook for his totally exposed craziness which resulted in the big broken promises of "No Australian teeny bopper will go without 100 mbps internet by whatever date I make up next". Trouble for El Stupido is the dates keep marching by and there is no sign that ANYONE (including Labor's Finance and Treasury departments) who believes it ever will be possible.....and the really bad news is that the next election is almost upon us and there's Labor going to have to make a call on exactly when this 100 mbps is going to actually deliver its first byte of data....not to mention explaining away why EVERY other promised 'improvement' to the Australian voters stupid enough to vote for this travelling circus called a Labor Government have never happened. The blissfully quiet Krudd-free period is about to end and that langorous moon faced moron will be back "making no apologies" on a TV screen near you before your sun burn fades to bright crimson but the idiot is now going to have to invent yet more new lies to explain why there is no NBN1 let alone an NBN2 and why it's OK for the crazies to vote him back to "finish the job". Let me take a guess.....It was all the fault of the GFC?
Saturday, January 9. 20102010 - The Year Every Thing Changes For Exetel?John Linton The new calendar year has begun exceptionally well with applications for new ADSL1, ADSL2 and wireless broadband services all tracking at over 50% higher than for the first 8 days of January 2008. Naturally 8 days is not a truly indicative period of what is going to happen but it has been something I've looked at each year of Exetel's 'life over the last 5 years and it has been a pretty good guide to what the full year tracks at. So the indications are that we will attract a much higher volume than we did last year when we operated the company very, very conservatively in many ways despite the lack of real signs of any overall economic downturn. We made a payment yesterday to start the ambitious project in Sri Lanka which, if it is successful, will play a part in beginning to ease the rural poverty in that country and also reduce the shooting of the dwindling number of wild elephants there. We also sent out the increased monthly payments to the endangered species programs we, and our customers support - totalling well over $A50,000 for January (mainly because of the large initial payment to the Milk/Elephant project but also because we have increased the money we commit to each of the projects we support). Our monthly recurrent bill run was a new 'record' but it only grew by a very small amount because we, unlike any other data communications company in Australia, reduced the plan charges for over 50% of our CURRENT customers by quite substantial amounts AS Well AS increasing the down load allowances on ALL current plans - something that is extraordinarily rare in this industry. We also hired a record number of people in a single month as well as giving a record number of employees salary increases and I notice our payments of commissions to agents has continued to increase to a very substantial level and our purchases from suppliers reached new highs in December with payments to Optus becoming the highest recurrent amount we have ever paid in one month to any supplier....all payments were made ahead of their due dates. In terms of every 'bench mark' we measure the progress of the company against - Exetel is doing better now that at any time in its existence and there are no indications in any of the things that we measure that this trend will not continue over the coming months - there appears to be no 'cloud, no bigger than a man's hand on any horizon' that I can meaningfully scan.......but, and this is the issue for me personally.....I lack any sort of enthusiasm for the daily tasks I perform and nothing I do goes anywhere towards re-kindling the enthusiasm, let alone the creativity that seemed to be so easy to bring to bear on any given situation in the past. Like any busy manager I dismiss these feelings by simply getting on with the next task and then the next but as a part owner of Exetel I look at the results of my efforts with less and less tolerance for the quality and creativity of the work I perform. I think I'd have had more than a 'quiet word' with any person either in Exetel or in any other organisation in which I've held some sort of overall management position who began to perform as I am doing lately but I can't seem to find the words I need to say to myself. An odd situation and one I am failing to address let alone resolve....and, yes, not being a complete fool I have run through all of the obvious options. Doubtless a solution will be found, one way or another, in the near future but in the meantime it is annoying to wake up each day with little or no enthusiasm for the day ahead. So it was with a great deal of relief that I woke up this morning with the understanding of what was causing my dis-illusionment and how to 'banish' it forever. It was so simple and so obvious it is embarrassing to realise how stupid I have been. All I have to do is stop having contact with total d***heads and actually listening/reading what they say. If I do this I will get 40% of my day back and I can do something about restoring some sort of reasonable health which is the root cause of all of my current problems.
Friday, January 8. 2010Managing People Part IIJohn Linton
1) Overall Requirements Of Setting Job Goals While it’s self evident, it sometimes appears that the base building block of setting job goals is either missed or forgotten. The main/only purpose of setting job goals from Exetel’s point of view is Exetel’s purposes at any given time are determined by its formal business plan which, among many other things, defines the number of personnel who will be employed by the company at any point in time and what those people will be paid. Any manager within Exetel must therefore know and understand what the company’s objectives are for each quarter of the ensuing 12 months and therefore what they are expected to do to meet their part(s) of the overall company business plan. Without that understanding job goals cannot be set effectively. Without knowing the specifics of Exetel’s, or any other company’s, objectives it should be obvious that any commercial organisation will have objectives that fall in to the general categories of: Increase revenue Every activity carried out by a commercial organisation falls in to those two major categories and one of the 6 sub-categories and any job goal must be related to one of those sub-categories. So, Exetel requires that any set of employee job goals are based on only defining individual tasks that meet the above criteria. 2) An Exetel Manager’s Requirement’s Of Setting Job Goals The first requirement for any Exetel manager is to have completely up to date job goals that have been agreed by both the individual manager and his/her manager. Without that starting point the Exetel will provide the overall business plan to each manager (minus some specific personnel and operational details) on a regular basis and any questions about the company’s short and medium term plans can be answered at any time simply by asking for additional clarification or information. Each Exetel manager’s job goals reflect a sub-set of the objectives set out in the business plan. While no single manager within Exetel has total responsibility for achieving the revenue and profit If you think about it for even a few moments you would see that the six sub-categories set out in the first section of this chapter can be directly related to every task that an Exetel manager or an Exetel Take the sub-category of “keeping all current customers” as an example. While a current customer may decide to leave Exetel because they can obtain a service from another provider at a lower cost or that includes more features or benefits a wide range of other aspects may cause a customer to leave Exetel that can be avoided by every person Network reliability It should be relatively simple to take any manager’s job goals and assign the responsibilities to those personnel for whom you are responsible ensuring that all tasks directly relate to achieving Exetel’s short and medium term objectives. If it isn’t, then the job goals the manager has accepted almost certainly need amending. 3) An Exetel Employee’s Requirement’s Of Job Goal Setting All employees, irrespective of whether it’s their first job or a job along their career path need to have their duties spelled out in terms that both the individual and their manager can easily understand Any ‘professional’ employee (which in Exetel’s case is every employee) needs to be given the opportunity of defining their own job If the manager concerned is lax or careless in agreeing and setting the job goals for each person for whom he/she is responsible then the process is not only pointless it is counter productive and a Of particular importance to each employee (and this of course includes all managers within Exetel) is the full agreement on how each Of equal importance, to both Exetel and the employee, is the agreement of the personal development the employee will need to progress their career within Exetel. Again, the developmental requirements must be related to the stated career development and must be achievable within the agreed time frame(s). While it’s obviously difficult for any person, no matter how intellectually gifted, to fully understand the in depth complexity of a process like job goal setting it should be obvious to every Exetel employee that it’s in their own very best interests to ensure that the job goals they agree to are capable on not only being met but are If either the manager or the employee believes that it isn’t possible, with the required effort, for the employee to achieve 100/100 on the finally agreed job goals then the process has not been done in the way that is required.
The reasons for assigning values to the different tasks in each person’s job goals is to allow both the employee and the manager to objectively determine how well the employee is performing in their The reason for assigning a total of 100 ‘points’ to each person’s job goals and breaking up the distribution of those ‘points’ in the way that places more emphasis on the first two sections of job By distributing the 100 points: Section 1 50 it allows the correct emphasis to be put on the major requirements of the company while ensuring that each employee continues to develop their abilities and skills so that they continue to develop The standard job goal layout used by Exetel has a column for “Value” for each task and next to that there are columns for “Achieved/Emp” and “Achieved/Mgr”. At the end of each quarter both the Having agreed the scores both parties assign to the tasks then the scores will be totaled, added together and divided by two to achieve a performance score for that quarter. This performance score determines the employee’s job performance rating which is determined as follows: 91 – 100 1 Far Exceeds all requirements of the position The date of the review and the rating are entered on to the job goal form, printed, signed by both the employee and the manager and sent to "personnel" for inclusion in the employee's file.. 5) Re-Setting Job Goals Job goals need to be reviewed at the end of each calendar quarter. Following the straightforward process described above will provide the basis for re-looking at and re-setting each employees job The first obvious thing that will come out of early use of the job goal system (by both the manager and each employee) is that there may be significant discrepancies between the ‘score’ assigned to As a manager gains more experience with setting job goals that are truly specifically applicable to each individuals duties the more tightly they will be able to define both the tasks and the methods of The second most common occurrence in setting job goals is that the manager doesn’t have the necessary systems/processes/tools in place to be able to measure what is required. This will continue to be a problem for as long as tasks are required to be done that can’t be objectively measured and should lead any manager towards the understanding that he/she is really asking people to do things which Having acknowledged that all human relationships with other humans defy the ability to ‘measure’ discretely the fact remains that the manager/employee relationship is predicated on one person telling In re-setting job goals, in consultation with each employee, a much better understanding is achieved on how much better all tasks can A major encouragement for the employee to ensure that their individual job goals are set as effectively as possible is the rating system and the consequential benefits in both remuneration and promotion terms that consistently high job goal performance ratings deliver. These are explained in the next section. The actual performance measurement achieved by any employee is used to determine the amount and frequency of remuneration increases as well as the suitability for promotion. 6) Job Goal Performance Rating Impacts The ability to determine, very accurately, the performance of each person employed by an organisation is an essential element in operating a business that will continue to meet its objectives with the Ideally Exetel’s aim is to have every employee rated as a “1” at each job goal review. If this were to be the case then Exetel would have a zero personnel loss rate and each employee would be getting the maximum job satisfaction and career development possible from each day of their working life. An Exetel’s manager’s job is to make this happen. The quarterly ratings are used in two ways that should ensure that each employee is highly motivated to both ensure that their job goals are set exactly correctly and then to achieve the highest The first reason is that the job goal rating determines the 1 8 months The second reason is that the job goal rating determines the amount of remuneration increase (in the same position) based on: 1 10% to a maximum of $9,000 pa The above time frames and percentages are guidelines and any actual remuneration change can only be approved by an Exetel director. These are compelling reasons for each Exetel employee, and their manager, to take a very real and thoughtful interest in the setting and agreeing of their job goals. For any employee of any 7) Summary I have been associated with the processes described in this chapter for over 40 years and have played a not insignificant part in developing this methodology to the current levels of implementation described here. I can state, categorically, that operating a company using these principles and procedures provides a better result for the company itself and each person who spends time working with a company In terms of assisting an individual become a better and more effective manager, nothing I have ever personally seen or been made aware of comes close to the power of correct job goal setting and reviewing in producing the best short, medium and long term results for developing any person’s management skills and abilities. Thursday, January 7. 2010"Managing" People Seems To Remain A Mystery In Commerce.....John Linton ........which seems strange as so many people are management experts and management consultants etc. In the years before I ran my own business I had many managers, when I try and count them I come to a number approaching 20 over a period of almost twenty years, and of course that period of almost two decades I 'observed' the behaviour of many times more than that. That time was spent with large multi-nationals (NCR, IBM, Sperry-Univac and Fujitsu) all of whom had significant commitments to 'management training' and significant commitments to human resources management within the companies. Over that time I had only one manager that I had any respect for and who was of any assistance to me. The others ranged from petty martinets to the totally ineffective and all of them shared a range of negative characteristics that were 'designed' to ensure the company that employed them got as little from the employees that they managed as was possible....which resulted in the highest possible employee turnover. I obviously didn't realise this until I was managed by the only one good manager I came across in my time working for companies I didn't own (Jim Gallagher - may he be enjoying his after life wherever great people persons go) but as soon as I had a good manager it became blindingly obvious; before that moment I had assumed that all managers didn't give a damn about the people they managed but were only interested in progressing their personal careers by sucking up to their superiors and spending their days on their personal affairs. (though to be fair Jim did tend to also spend more time than he should on his personal "affairs" - he was no saint which you would have needed to have been to have resisted trying your luck with the delectable lady in question - even though he was married and she was married to someone else). In Exetel's end of year career direction reviews all of Exetel's managers said that they needed "management training" as none of them have any management background, most are very young and for many Exetel has been their first 'real' employer and certainly the only employer that has given them a 'management position'. Now that this point has been raised so comprehensively (though Annette tells me it has been raised before) we will have to do something about it but that is always going to be difficult in a company of Exetel's size as we have very little time or opportunity to even do the planning for the education of a dozen or so widely differing people, in two different countries, across widely differing functions let alone subsequently carrying out whatever had been planned. One more thing to worry about let alone do anything about. Personally, I have never found ANY management training I ever attended at any company I worked for of the slightest value in any way, shape or form. Much of the formal management training I attended was at IBM and Sperry-Univac with IBM's training organised and largely carried out 'in house' with several 'guest speakers' and Sperry's carried out by 'world wide' consultants paid for by the HR function in Bluebell (lovely name for one of the dreariest towns in the USA). All of those courses were lofty in intent and laughable in execution (not just my opinion) at which I learned nothing and wasted an enormous amount of my employer's time and money attending. Having had those experiences I have never used 'consultants' or other people in the companies with which I have been associated to do "management training". My personal view is that you can do nothing to teach a person to manage people - they either do it naturally or nothing anyone else can teach them can make them any better as managers - it can make them worse but not better. After being in some sort of management position or other for something like forty years the only things that make a good manager can be summed up as: 1) Only hire people you like - it's impossible to build a sensible personal manager/employee relationship with anyone you don't like. 2) Ensure you have clearly set out what an employee is expected to do, in detail, and then always be available to help with anything an employee needs help with - any time of any day - with a smile and with enthusiasm. 3) Publicly and privately praise and encourage when ever possible but ONLY when it is sincere and as often as possible confirm it in writing. 4) Never, ever, criticise in public. Never criticise in private unless it is absolutely essential. 5) Pass as much of your own knowledge as possible as sensibly quickly as possible throughout the relationship. I'm sure I could 'spin' these five pieces of advice into a 3 or 4 day course but there would be no point - someone who is going to work out as a good manager instinctively already knows this is the way of living their commercial 'life'...if they don't - then no amount of 'management training' is going to be of any use. Wednesday, January 6. 2010The Year Of Wireless Broadband?John Linton We failed to make much progress in developing viable wireless broadband offerings in 2009 despite putting a lot of effort and, for us, a lot of money into various attempts. We have been told by various sources that our failures were unique and that other suppliers had succeeded in rapidly growing wireless broadband sales across the whole spectrum of Australian marketplaces which made me feel even more unhappy about our own failures. The major reasons for our failures were all my fault in both planning and execution and I have no excuses for making the mistakes I did as I should have known better. But, life and markets move on and as more lower end residential ADSL users begin to realise that giving up their land line isn't the end of civilisation as we know it the market for wireless services continues to expand. We had our best ever wireless order day yesterday (just on double the previous best day) and I would like to think that is an 'omen' for things to come. We have begun the serious re-vamping of our wireless plans and will make a much more serious attempt to get them exactly right for the three different marketplaces we will now pursue and pursue much more vigorously, and much more aggressively than we did in 2009. I would expect the LTE trials by both Optus and Telstra to continue to 'educate' the Australian market on the advantages of wireless broadband if only because there will be some 'oohing and ahhing' as those companies publish the results of those trials - in particular the fact that LTE, in a surprising number of places, will deliver much faster speeds than ADSL2+. Of course that interest needs to be sustained by realistic delivery dates and, as importantly, realistic prices per gb used. I have zero ability to forecast what price and what availability LTE will result in other than expecting that Telstra will attempt to continue to set prices at the sky high level (why would they change the habit of a corporate life time?) and Optus will pursue their established policies of using some form of 'Telstra minus' model - so the end result for LTE itself may not be that exciting for the majority of users....but the wider and wider publicity should push up the sales levels of wireless broadband generally. Three key changes should also help wireless broadband sales. Firstly the cost of the standalone wireless modem will continue to fall as a piece of hardware as more and more laptops/notebooks and more and more routers include the chipset making the necessity of a separate 'modem' redundant. This will 'advantage' Exetel as we have never been able to afford to provide a "free modem" as the carriers and their major retailers do - nice to have the market move in your favour for a change. This will make a major difference in itself. The second reason is that with close to or (depending on the next ABS figures) over 3,000,000 wireless modems already sold the need for a substantial number of people buying wireless modems from Exetel continues to fall each month as new customers for Exetel wireless already have compatible modems from previous purchases or just buy them on eBay. So the ability of the big suppliers to 'bundle' a free wireless modem (and lock the user in to a long contract) will continue to decline as a 'plus' for those suppliers doing it. The third thing, clearly demonstrated in the AT&T figures I cited the other day and partially confirmed by Telstra's revised downwards revenue forecasts for this financial year, is the accelerating move away from wire line usage. The additional 'saving' of the $A30.00 per month cost of a wire line rental (ignoring the high call charges) makes wireless broadband, by definition, $A30.00 a month more appealing IF the customer believes they can effectively use VoIP over their wireless broadband connection. You can be sure that, at least for the time being, Telstra and Optus will not provide a VoIP solution but, of course, there are many providers of VoIP so that won't deter Telstra and Optus wireless broadband buyers from using it. It therefore removes another current advantage of the carriers - their ability to use their own low cost mobile and PSTN call minute costs as a 'bundled' advantage over companies such as Exetel. Perhaps I'm kidding myself but I see these three 'trends' all moving in Exetel's favour and that is an encouragement over the situation in 2009. We do have to find ways of making the wireless plans much more appealing to the marketplaces we are going to 'pursue' and that is really very difficult for us at the moment but as it is essential we will just have to find a way...because I really do think this is going to be the year of breaking the wire line monopoly on delivering data for around 50% of the total broadband marketplace.
Tuesday, January 5. 2010'Wholesalers' - A Dying Breed?John Linton There seems to be no 'let up' in the competitiveness of the international IP supply market and not as many of the suppliers have seemingly taken their annual holidays over Christmas this year....but there's a new 'twist' in the approaches we are receiving....it seems to be based around "now that TPG have taken over Pipe it would be a good idea to lock in today's heavily discounted pricing before our head office in [Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore] removes the special discounts we have offered you" or the other company's approach along the same lines of "perhaps you should consider signing a long term contract as with Pipe gone from the market prices are likely to rise rather than fall next year". I thought that was a nice 'touch' for so early in the new calendar year but it does cause a sensible person to consider the whole 'buying from a wholesaler who has a retail interest greater than its wholesale interest' scenario....which was Pipe's, when it was an independent company, major attraction (apart from its competitive pricing). It was also the major attraction of Powertel prior to its takeover by AAPT....buying from a wholesale only company was a significant plus in both cases. The reality of the telecommunications market in Australia, for companies of Exetel's size is that if we want to offer residential services the only residential network of any size at all is owned by Telstra with companies like Optus and AAPT having smaller networks but, like Telstra, dependent on their retail offerings for their major revenue and profit streams. Hardly new news but, for a variety of reasons, something that people like me sometimes 'forget' in the maelstrom of dealing with the day to day issues of trying to remain viable in highly competitive marketplaces. The latest approaches by two international IP providers is a jolting reminder that in losing Pipe as an automatic consideration for inter-State and intra city connections there is a loss of flexibility that had become quite 'comforting' and that reminds a cautious person like me that other current 'wholesaled' services may well not remain as 'viable' as they have been in the past as the suppliers concerned try to retain their residential market shares in the post sun set/saturation scenarios of ADSL, telephone call and even mobile telephony services. It's hard to see, having no information, how the increasing pressure caused by falling revenues on the PSTN in terms of lower call usage and higher cancellation of actual lines can cause anything but an increase in rental charges for the remaining lines - the arithmetic is very, very simple for any fixed cost service that has less and less users - maintenance costs decline more slowly than customer loss = higher cost per user. Similarly ALL suppliers (from Telstra downwards) deployed ADSL boxes in local exchanges based on whatever their personal estimates were of the 'growth' of ADSL demand.Telstra's predictions of no revenue growth and the need for companies like TPG and iinet to meet the aggressive growth forecasts in their various capital raisings are the most obvious aspects of what MUST happen to retail pricing in both wire line telephone rental and ADSL pricing over the coming year. All of these companies have got a fixed cost 'network' based on various estimates of how many customers they would connect to those networks - unless they all had the foresight to predict the current scenarios then they all face the same problem Telstra does with the PSTN - declining revenues against fixed costs and, as you see in their 'deck chair shuffling' in the last quarter of 2009 - no ability to decrease their end user pricing to meet competitive actions because that would just turn a difficult situation in to an impossible one. So these companies will face very difficult revenue/profit issues over the coming year and an inevitable outcome of their retail revenue issues is almost certainly going to be an impact on their wholesale pricing and desires.....I think their 'desires' will be to attempt to fix their retail revenue streams at the 'expense' of their much lower wholesale revenue streams. Which brings me back to the Pipe situation as it is the most obvious example of the dangers of buying services from suppliers that are having retail problems. It would be very silly to continue to buy services from a supplier who competes with you at a retail level and is having problems meeting its retail revenue and profit targets....they have too many ways of damaging your business 'unintentionally' - and if you think I'm being alarmist then I can only say that, right at this moment, we appear to be experiencing this scenario from one of our major suppliers. There is no solution to this problem that I can see. It is simply a cyclical aspect of booming then dying technologies. What we can do in the immediate 'now' is going to be the key question for today and until we move away from buying from companies who have this problem. It would be nice to be able to sell a 'unique' product/service instead of a wholesaled one...one can only dream.
Monday, January 4. 2010It Sure Doesn't Look Like Kansas Toto.........John Linton ..........but where can we be? I have no idea what 2010 will bring but all of the 'signals' I am seeing or picking up seems to indicate that I am not the only person participating in the running of a small company that is not sure of what is happening, or will happen, in the coming year. If Telstra's public statements late in 2009 are to be believed and come out on the more negative side of their forecasts then 2010 may be the first year in the '100 or so years of history' of telecommunications in Australia that the monopoly telecommunications provider has not increased its revenue - pretty much a negative land mark in itself and making everything else that might happen pale in to insignificance. Of course, the more likely analysis of those statements would suggest that while the first half of 2010 (and therefore the last six months of FY 2010) will be tough enough, Telstra's public announcements were just to make any growth at all look like their management did well in a universally tough period for the industry....though, at least as far as I can see, there are no indications that business is anything but very good at the moment and for the past year or so...perhaps I need to look more closely in case there is an 'iceberg' or two that have drifted too far South for this time of year......or their business or financial equivalents. Perhaps things will become clearer as the larger companies return to work and look at what they see to be the current status of the various 'marketplaces'. There was that little flurry of deck chair shifting in the last quarter of the year but nothing of any magnitude which would normally suggest that everything was 'on target' for the larger companies - except for Telstra's strange announcement of 'flat' growth and TPGs successive (panicky?) rapid changes to its main ADSL offering (a 50% change in in two tranches in two months isn't "planned". Since then the proverbial 'slow months' have kicked in and nothing more has happened in terms of publicly observable changes or new 'initiatives'. From what I can see business, at least for Exetel in terms of new and churn in orders for our various services, are running at 20% up at the lowest growth service to many hundreds of percent in the highest growth service (because of the resources we have allocated to that service) throughout the last six months. So the real question is....based on Telstra's statements in late 2009......has the whole marketplace slowed to a zero growth scenario or have the combined efforts of all other communications companies eaten in to Telstra's market shares and therefore all other communications companies are seeing an average increase in their growth consistent with Telstra's decline? (bearing in mind that Telstra has in excess of 70% of the total communications market and their lack of growth would dramatically magnify the results of their competitors). The answer to this question will be available when Optus and AAPT make their half year results public in a few weeks time (and to a lesser extent TPG and iinet) and until then everything is just guess work for us as we have only very limited sources of information. As with every week/day of Exetel's life to date we will act conservatively - planning for the worst/hoping for the best - and continuing our never ending processes of trying to add new levels of efficiency to every thing we do and trying to reduce the prices of everything we buy in the knowledge that if we don't achieve those twin objectives which will continue to allow us to offer the lowest prices for each of the services we offer we will not continue to succeed in staying in business. Perhaps the time has come to have a serious look around to see what other opportunities there might be for Exetel in addition to or in replacement of our current activities/offerings? Nothing ever really changes.
Sunday, January 3. 2010A Confusing Future For People Who Know What They Are Doing........John Linton
Personally I don't give any thought to the Krudd 'NBN2' face saving stunt beyond occasionally speculating on what, if any, effect it will have on Telstra and therefore Telstra's wholesale decisions as the next few years grind on and the current lies become more and more exposed. As you may, or more probably because why would you care, may not know there have been ongoing machinations in the USA regarding telecommunications infrastructure 'commitments' in the USA and various large carriers have made submissions to the committees responsible for the direction of telecommunications in the USA. A colleague sent me this yesterday: http://www.betanews.com/article/ATT-The-end-of-the-wireline-telephone-is-in-sight/1262297110 which gives an insight into the current problems in that country of the 'wind down' of their gigantic PSTN and its replacement by newer technologies. If you can't be bothered to read the whole article (or in much more detail the link to the actual submission let me at least recommend that you read the reply (3rd down at the time of writing) by "telcoguy' and this exerpt contains the raw details which the article addresses: "The numbers speak for themselves. Today, less than 20% of Americans These declines represent the 'sunset' years of a technology when the sun is actually starting to dip below the horizon. It also starkly illustrates the problem that Telstra has in Australia which is now far worse than the problem faced by the big US carriers. Telstra shares the problem of maintaining a PSTN that is being abandoned by its users and therefore the revenue/profit earned is declining while the maintenance costs decline at a slower rate but, now Krudd and co have stepped in, Telstra doesn't get to build the replacement network that builds replacement revenue and profit and has no incentive to maintain the PSTN except at higher prices to all concerned - and quite justifiably so.....at least as far as the actual facts are known. So, if I'm understanding this, and the other submissions I've read on the replacement of PSTN by fibre (or whatever) correctly, AT&T are clearly making the point that the 'owner' of the PSTN is the only 'party' that should be allowed to build a replacement network otherwise it has absolutely no incentive to keep the PSTN operating while the customers slowly transfer to the new network owned by a competitor. Seems logical enough and bearing in mind the fibre replacement will take some years to roll out it seems equally clear that the burden of maintaining the PSTN for an ever fewer number of users is a key financial consideration....hence the various submissions by the US carriers to their FCC. Perhaps the more sanguine observers can take the view that the Australian government has Telstra thrown, hog tied and ready for the knife if this scenario is correct? Maybe Telstra's recent significant reduction in its revenue forecasts is based on the sort of PSTN abandonment numbers being experienced by the US carriers? Irrespective of which view you take it seems inevitable that the changes in economy of operating the PSTN will damage Telstra's abilities to make its profit targets which, in my view, can only result in higher prices for ADSL as Telstra will have a case that even the ACCC will agree makes providing SSS or ULL more expensive as each year goes by and any 'NBN2' commissioning will simply escalate that price curve. That's the problem with people who have zero knowledge making decisions about things - it ends in tears.
Saturday, January 2. 2010Cheats, Thieves And Fundamental Orifices.....John Linton ....not the words that immediately spring to my mind when describing Exetel's employees and managers.....but apparently I'm mistaken. I dealt with three emailed complaints yesterday that used those three words and several more along the same lines caused by Exetel increasing the monthly allowance on several of its plans (by as much as 10 gigabytes of peak usage) and reducing the excess usage charges from $1.50 to $0.50....yes....increasing the value of the plans and reducing the cost is obviously the work of an ISP that is describable as "thieving", "cheating", "fundamentally dishonest" and is operated and managed by "total ****holes". The three people I replied to used grossly foul language and one of them extended their peroration of righteous indignation to twelve paragraphs of vituperation. The reason for these expressions of total disgust with Exetel and all of its employees? Our plan changes that despite being advised to the customers on the web site pricing pages and via an email (to those who subscribe to "plan and service" changes) as becoming available from 1st January 2010 had taken the view that the additional allowances and reduced excess charges would be added to their current plans although the changes were only announced in the last few days of December. Clearly our attempts at making it clear that these new benefits were only available from 1st January 2010 were not made clearly enough. So I responded to each of the complainants apologising profusely for Exetel being thieves, crooks, scammers or whatever each individual had described us as in their initial email and, as we had yet to process the bank files for the January bill run (it being a public holiday on Friday), I committed to removing the "overcharges" from their invoice although pointing out that to claim it being an "over charge" was both ridiculous and dishonest. I received two emails in reply demanding that Exetel should do more than apologise for our "chicanery" (nice to see that some of our customers have a dictionary) and one thought we should credit the whole invoice amount as a "gesture of good faith" and the other thought that "at least two month free service" would compensate him for the pain and suffering he had been caused by "Exetel over charging him". Talk about 'taking your breath away'. So I slept on it as I was in no position to make any sort of sensible decision on what sort of reply should be sent to such people. Having had a night's sleep I replied to both their emails earlier this morning and I also sent a further email to the third complainant setting out how I actually viewed firstly their complaints and in the case of the unbelievable two exactly what I thought of their request for "compensation". Doubtless they will find my emails to be inappropriate but I wonder whether they will consider that writing to a perfect stranger and using totally intemperate and completely inappropriate language is 'appropriate'? I very much doubt it if they received such correspondence. Even if I tried really, really hard and removed all logic and basic information from the scenario I couldn't possibly find a way of agreeing that a person of even below average intelligence could decide that he/she had had the terms and conditions of supply of his/her service had been changed without notice. Even if I stretched my imagination to its fullest extent I can't believe that someone who saw such a change wouldn't email or call the supplier to confirm the situation. But that's just me - clearly it is more than possible as at least three people have clearly shown. Personally, I have trouble believing there are people in Australia that stupid. If there are then God knows how they manage to live an independent life. But, again personally, I don't want personally, or to have Exetel personnel, be abused by such people nor do I want to be put in a position of having to deal with such people and, of course, I fully understand that such people shouldn't put themselves in a position where "lying, thieving, cheating scumbag companies like Exetel" should be able to rip them off - they should be protected from such gross abuse as they don't seem to be able to protect themselves from becoming subject to such abuse. Obviously the very first thing that they need to do is to immediately move away from a "scumbag" company like Exetel to one that will not "rip them off at every opportunity". I'll have to give some considerable thought as to how Exetel can help them best resolve this totally unacceptable situation......and there I was...hoping for a pleasant day. I wonder if it is far too late to find a job I am competent to carry out?
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