John Linton
......and still the trends do not show the expected impacts being seen in the half year reports by the big telecommunication companies.
February is seldom a very exciting month, in financial terms, usually having three less working days which as a percentage is quite significant. So it was good to see when I eventually woke up this morning (some two hours later than usual for no apparent reason other than the very dull Sydney day and the travel to and from the Gold Coast yesterday via Brisbane). While Exetel's results of no interest to anyone but Exetel it has become a significant indicator that we maintain our month on month achievement of greater revenue and so far we have managed to do that for 73 consecutive months - of itself of no real meaning but we tend to treat it as a base line measurement that we are keeping the business on track irrespective of what may be happening in our marketplaces and the wider Australian and then the world wide general financial situations. One less thing to worry about but we will have to worry about the transition we are trying to make from thin margin plans to even thinner margin plans (even lower cost plans, no account charge, 50 cent per gb excess charges instead of $A3.00 etc).
I attended the communications media 'kick start' conference at Sanctuary Cove yesterday which was interesting in some ways but the most exciting incident of the day was when the aircraft was landing in Sydney and just as the wheels were about to touch the tarmac full power was applied to the engines and the plane turned sharply to the right and struggled to gain altitude for a few seconds. The pilot later explained that their was an 'error' in the control tower that had told another flight it could take off on the same runway on which we were landing. I think more than a few hearts beat quite a bit harder for 20 seconds or so before the aircraft settled in to a climb. Apart from that there was nothing very interesting.
My, perhaps biased, assessment of the knowledge displayed by the 'panelists' on the three topics of the 'NBN2', the 'break up' of Telstra and the internet filter was that it was practically zero - if not dangerously wrong.
The lobbyist (the competitive carriers coalition) for iPrimus and AAPT whose name I can't remember was the most stupid trotting out his foreign masters nonsense about how NBNCo and the break up of Telstra would be good for all Australians - by which he meant a US and a NZ company would be able to rip off Australians in a similar way that Telstra does without the minor benefit of the proceeds of those rip offs remaining in the Australian economy.
The Greens Senator displayed, up close, the pointlessness of having minority partners in any governmental system by articulating his party's willingness to accommodate Krudd in his ruination of Australian communications in exchange for some undefined accommodation on some greens pet project - the fact that he (the person within his party for investigating communications) knew nothing about any aspect of filtering, how Telstra operates or could be made to operate, or what Mad Kevin's 'NBN2' delusions meant for Australia seemed of no concern to him....but then.....it would be difficult to find any person who sat in the Australian Senate since federation that would have been any different.
The nice man from the AIIA said a number of things about issues I had either never heard of nor understood in any way so I can't really form any view of what he contributed to those subjects but, to me, what he said seemed unrelated to what I thought the topics were about. Again that could simply be my ignorance.
My own contributions were the same as anyone who has ever read my opinions on the subjects would know them to be - I was the only person on the 'panel' who thought each of Krudd's nonsensical pipe dreams were political stunts to bail himself out of having to admit he lied in the lead up to the last election.
So, pretty much a waste of a day (left home at 8.30 am - got home at 7.45 pm) though I met some communications journalists I never had before and somehow managed to 'distribute' the 20 business cards I had with me before I ran out. I also had a brief few words with a couple of journalists I had met before and caught up some of the latest gossip which would be interesting if it's true.