John Linton
.....but I don't seem to be seeing the more general changes I had anticipated by this time.
February has been a very good month for Exetel (although it's not quite over yet) with new ADSL applications over 30% higher than February 2009 and all but SMS all higher than February last year. Corporate Ethernet/SHDSL sales were 100% up which continues the pleasing
development of building the corporate business aspects of Exetel's overall business. So a really solid month with excellent prospects for
March and beyond. I still have no idea what the results reported so far mean - other than ADSL was very 'flat' in the last six months of 2009 but without seeing what TPG reports and with the ABS figures not available until the last day of March there is not going to be any 'reliable' information until 9 months of the current year has already gone. (talking of reliable information the ASX reports filed by M2 and Macquarie Telecom rival iinet for questionable statements that omit significant 'facts').
So what does it all mean? ADSL is slow/static/falling for more than one or two suppliers with Telstra perhaps suffering the worst as the largest provider always will - they have the most to lose in terms of the largest number of users paying absolute top of the tree pricing for bottom of the ocean services and inclusions. It's also looking as though the 20 years of 'bundling' services is reaching an end with the long beloved wire line telephone line rental and 'low cost' (that's a laugh) telephone calls so threadbare now even the dumbest of the dumb buyers can see though it. Trying to 'bundle in' mobile telephone services is now becoming the last gasp in that particular con but it is not going to be very easy to shear the sheep until they bleed for that much longer. So while the total mess that is the 'NBN2' continues to eat away at communications
abilities in Australia what is to be done - particularly over the balance of this financial year and beyond?
In trying to work out what is happening there is one good thing, assuming we are reading it correctly, in that AAPT and TPG's ongoing blanket advertising of "unlimited broadband" (though you have to say the TPG wording is not exactly ethical) is that the customers churning away from Exetel are, not unexpectedly, the people who use the most downloads with over 90% of the ones who left to go to either AAPT or TPG in February so far being in the top 2% of 'down loaders' on the Exetel network. Although these churn aways only represented much less than half of one percent of Exetel's total customer base the effect on our 5 gbps network was noticeable and allowed us to do something unheard of in our six years of operation - we actually reduced the Sydney bandwidth by 150 mbps! Now 150 mbps is not much in terms of the total NSW bandwidth (around 3%) but it costs us over $A10,000 so the additional 'profit' is very large as a percentage. It is not that important in itself but it is
something to be considered if it's going to be an ongoing trend. It's things like this that make the current scenario so very hard to understand in terms of demographic shifts caused by suppliers under pressure.
I like the ideas of offering back up wireless services with ADSL plans but, having looked at it several different ways over the past few months, we haven't come up with a viable way of doing it.
I am against bundling in general, although we have no choice in terms of the Optus ADSL2 plans, and I am hesitant about bundling wireless with wire line plans but there are several avenues that looked promising before hitting a dead end. Nil Desperandum - there is bound to be some solution if we just keep working on it.
In the mean time let's hope that March turns out as well as the previous 2 months of this calendar year......I didn't know why that was either.