John Linton ......everything looks a little 'greyer' despite it being a very pleasant day.
We got home a short while ago after a 16 hour journey 'door to door' and started to look at what's been happening in communications land during the short absence. Maybe it's the effect of 5 days of relaxed activities in another country but nothing much seems to have happened over the past week that affects anything Exetel does:
- Telstra seem to have started another one of their endless 'promotions' offering ADSL2 to Exetel customers (and I assume other ISPs customers) at below the wholesale prices they sell Exetel ADSL1 connections for which is the way they get round ACCC invigilation ("oh no officer - we haven't changed our retail pricing we are just running a limited promotion for a short time - honest").
- We have made some progress in one of our two legal matters with Telstra and have also attempted a way forward with our case against the TIO.
- One of the two banks we use wrote to us agreeing to lend us around $A8 million to buy IP bandwidth from SCCC or some other carrier providing that.....etc......etc.
- Sales of all but one 'product' tracked to plan over the week
- Telephone and email customer response times continued to track towards the EOFY targets
So, all in all, I may be able to take more time off in the future as I could have contributed nothing to anything at Exetel over the past week.
My main task in the 3 days or so left between now and the start of April is to decide on how to address the apparent positioning of voice telephone calls (and 'lines') becoming a 'standard' inclusion in broad band plans - whether ADSL, Wireless or the putative 'NBN2' fibre offers. It seems that the consensus of the 'bundlers' is that Telstra's voice call services are dead meat moving forward and those suppliers that have any sort of significant revenues from telephone voice calls on the PSTN/ISDN are rushing for the exits and trying to mitigate the damage with VoIP - it's been coming for a long time and maybe this is just an acceleration point? I did notice in the tracking we do that there has been a threefold increase in data plans including 'unlimited' voice calls as part of the 'deal'.
Over the past year these offers have become more real and less deceptive and are a sensible approach in almost every way. Voice calls are only another data stream and they can be easily 'included' in a data product offering. The childish mumblings about "mums and dads not having the technical abilities to handle VoIP" are as inaccurate now as they always were and few people with an IQ above their shoe size wouldn't be able to change their PSTN to VoIP in a few minutes with simple instructions. We have been offering various plans that include VoIP for some two plus years now and have developed our own systems and installed our own switches over that time to be able to offer progressively more sophisticated VoIP services (as well as the SMS and FAX services) and we are now able to offer a pretty good MoIP service on Nokia hand sets and on Apple iPhone handsets in the near future.
However, we now need to sort out exactly how we either 'bundle' 'unlimited' VoIP calls or provide an extension of the add on packs we have had for a while now. I don't think I will be able to spend any time on that today but it is the key project to complete over the next few days.
Amazing how quickly a holiday begins to fade from your memory.