Tuesday, March 16. 2010Back To The Future.....John Linton ....one more time. I had a call from the people in the UK with whom I was talking up to late July of last year about Exetel providing wireless broadband in the UK via some very attractive arrangements using the T Mobile network owned by Deutsche Telekom. As I made reference to in a blog around that time - that opportunity disappeared when DT decided to dispose of their assets in a different way. However, the opportunity now seems to have re-emerged and the people I was talking to then have become some sort of arbitrageur for wireless network access and wanted to know whether Exetel is still interested in what they have to offer. I regretfully said that the time had come and gone when we could consider operating in the UK but thanked them for the opportunity. With the current uncertainties in the Australian ADSL marketplaces there is no way we can expend any of our very scarce resources in a start up operation some 20,000 kms away. It triggered in my fading memory that things were very different only nine months ago than they are today. I really would have liked to have gone ahead with seeing if we could make wireless broad band 'work' in another country better than we could in Australia and use the economy of scale that would produce to buy hardware at UK prices rather than at the prices we currently pay - UK pricing being one quarter (then) of what we were paying and now is one fifth of the cost. It would have been a major assistance in more rapidly developing the Australian wireless markets we were aiming at. Oh well....you can never seldom go back to an old girl friend or an old business opportunity and certainly not that one with all that has changed in the last few short months. We have begun to 'sort out' what we will buy in terms of base services over the coming 12 - 36 months as we need to make a decision before Annette and I go away at the end of this week and make some personal decisions of our own. Steve and I, either separately or together have been dealing with many of the companies who have provided us with proposals for many years - some stretching back well before the 'creation' of Exetel. In some cases the person submitting the proposal has submitted proposals to us in the past for a different company and one person is now submitting a proposal for the third company he has worked for over the past ten years or so. The main problem is that only one company could provide all the services we need but they don't want to do that and the best pricing and conditions for most of the 'elements' we want are provided by different companies. Even if we don't get any more suitable bids before the tender period closes we could address two of our four major issues more than adequately but, personally, I really don't want to do that. So, as far as I can see, everything has that 'deja vu' look about it and we seem, in some ways, to be back in January 2004 trying to finalise contracts with suppliers that would allow us to get our new business off the ground and survive on the very thin margins our lack of buying 'power' were available to us. Although our current monthly major supplier spend has increased from zero to approaching $A4 million over the intervening years it hasn't helped us buy better than our competitors which means that our 'negotiation' skills have not improved and we are still dis-advantaged in doing business in the various markets in which we operate. I would have hoped to have become much better at this elementary aspect of business life but it appears that either my childhood education or my genetic inheritance has made that impossible. At this time the only certainties are that we can reduce our IP costs by more than 50% and that we can reduce all of our inter-city and intra-city back hauls by at least 50%. We can reduce one, but not all, of our residential port costs by around 25% and could reduce two of them by around that percentage. We could reduce wireless broad band costs substantially - but not in the way we need to do that and VoP minute costs could be reduced if we were to commit to volumes I, personally, am uncomfortable with. So not a great deal of progress on meeting the price points we sought to achieve in these ever more difficult times. We have made a lot of progress on our support and sales processes which are delivering both sales and retention benefits and we may have to make do with those steps forward for the time being. Maybe we'll be more successful next year if we don't opt for longer term contracts this time? PS: An indication of how Telstra's shareholders may vote on any sale to the NBNCo: http://www.smh.com.au/business/big-investor-warns-on-telstra-20100315-q9ls.html
Monday, March 15. 2010Who Turned Out The Lights?.......John Linton .........or is just my 'eyesight' suffering from cataract growth at an amazing speed? Trying to work out what is happening in the current ADSL market places is hard enough but making even a wide ranging estimate of what may happen in the April - June quarter that is only a couple of weeks away is, at least for me, completely impossible - for the first time in almost 9 years of pretty close association with the supply and sale of ADSL services in Australia. I have always been able to make pretty accurate estimates as to what will happen over the coming 3/6/12 month periods and as time moves and the actual results as they happen become real my estimates and forecasts pretty much match the realities - which has always been re-assuring in continuing to decide where to invest our very limited funds and which major areas of the marketplaces to pursue. But now, I don't have any idea of where the market places in which we have been involved in are heading and have even less clue as to what other companies actions will be. Pretty depressing if you have a responsibility to plan for the future and put in place actions and investments to bring those plans to reality. Not being anything but essentially pragmatic (or perhaps arrogant?) I am taking the view that if I can't see the future relatively clearly then it is probable, perhaps highly probable, that several or more than several other people in other companies are having the same problems. Because if there is anyone with a clear sense of the current market's direction it doesn't seem to be apparent to me. Perhaps all that means is that I have lost, or never had, the ability to actually understand what happened/is about to happen in ADSL markets and its suppliers. Then I look back over the past nine years and decide that is unlikely to be the case.....but I certainly can't see what is going to happen in the next three months. So - this becomes an issue, not today, but over the coming 6 - 9 months but does make some significant decision making today more difficult that it has been than in any time we have operated Exetel. For instance - investing another $A8 million in Exetel to buy two SCCC STM16s which have a theoretical 'life of ten years' only has a relevance if there is a need for that band width in 2020. If there is only a need of it for 2 years then the finance equations change dramatically. Similarly buying additional real estate (or even committing to the rental of additional real estate) becomes very different. Then there are the less large decisions like employee growth decisions and hardware investments and.....all the other trivia involved in running a company of Exetel's size. I spent most of Sunday playing with different scenarios of our Australian and Sri Lankan 'business plans' and finished up totally confused....I needed a Mrs Victor (especially as played by Miranda Richardson) to tell me "Jim - you think too much"....because the conclusion I came to was to just do what we have been doing for the past six years - reducing every cost we can by automation and 'discussion' and to aim at the lowest possible profit margins consistent with not losing money and making enough money to support the endangered species we have committed to assist. I realised I had wasted another Sunday on pointless speculation and got nowhere. There are no real changes we can make in the short term to the long term objectives we have aspired to since we began the business although current circumstances are very different. I wish i was more certain about what changes will occur over the coming months - but I don't - and messing around with the closed loop that is bound by the limits of the information I currently have is as fruitless an exercise as it ever was. A total waste of time. Next Sunday I am going to take a few days off to 'celebrate' a key birthday of most people's working lives in Japan with my wife and those of my children who can be spared to spend time away from their employer's needs for them so frivolously. I chose Japan as the 'venue' for this occasion as I would like to show some of the people closest to me two things that changed my perception of working life so completely when I went there for the first time in my 'adult' life some thirty years ago. If that doesn't work out then we will hopefully enjoy a few days in a different cultural environment. I have wasted too many weekends over the last six years and now have too few to waste any more. PS: Another analysis explaining why the 'NBN2' remains a craven political sound byte attempting to cover up a major election promise breaking fiasco: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/how-highspeed-broadband-will-be-the-death-of-telstra-20100314-q60n.html Sunday, March 14. 2010Heaven Or Hell?John Linton (courtesy of a contributor)
So his soul arrives in Heaven and he is met by Saint Peter at the Pearly
Saturday, March 13. 2010Time Of Too Many Changes......John Linton ........or that's the way it seems to me......time to retire? So, TPG completes the purchase of Pipe for a more than reasonable price and the next thing after that announcement from my RSS is this: Earlier in the day I had read this: which is an indication that you should always consider everything a lot longer than you ever have time to do. It's far too early to make any sort of predictions on what current Pipe customers will stay beyond their current contract end date but, I suppose, that Internode's announcement is pretty clear evidence that SCCC bandwidth is, currently, more cost effective than Pipe's "foundation customer" pricing that Internode pays for Pipe bandwidth - discounting what seemed to be a negative assessment about Pipe's 'quality': "The Southern Cross Cable proposition, with the lowest latency to the While the new NZ consortium's statement is simply that, a press release of intent, it seems no more unlikely than Pipe's original 'press announcement' that they were going to build an international IP link and it may happen and it may even happen within the estimated time frame....only time will tell....but it's an indication that whenever you make a decision in this industry it is always wise to commit yourself to as short a term as possible. We are reaching the end of the tender process for IP and have received one proposal that, subject to completing the tender process at the end of next week, we would be happy to implement. We have still to receive responses from one of our major suppliers and one of the 'keenest' of the 'new' suppliers in the market so we will not be making any premature decisions but while I am sure that Internode may well get better STM16 pricing from SCCC than we would, the current on offer pricing is the best we have seen and, despite the up front investment cost, is still likely to be the best for our current needs - though the 3 year time frame we were basing the math on maybe nearing the 'adventurous' end of the risk analysis spectrum - based on what we are beginning to become aware of. The major issue, for us, remains what will happen in the Australian ADSL market and how quickly we can continue to build our business user base against our highly ambitious target of developing business revenue to a level that exceeds current residential internet revenue by July 2011. We completed our first 12 months of this process at the end of February and we are almost on target so far - in this easiest stage of this ambitious project. I say easiest because obviously the monthly sales targets were quite low as we built the operation from ground zero (in terms of developing a brand new set of selling concepts with a brand new set of people) and also developing a support capability well ahead of the time it would be needed (a much longer process though I was amused to see that Exetel was ranked very highly for its support services in two recent surveys). Perhaps TPG's purchase of Pipe will work out just the way the financing case documentation would have predicted - David Teoh rarely makes a bad buying decision though this one is very different from the pattern his previous purchases 'established' going back to the early 1990s and up to the time of purchasing Soul....very much a purchaser of distressed assets unless my memory is less reliable than usual. Maybe the buying out of Pipe will simply benefit NextGen as they are a logical alternate supplier to buying from a company that simply wants to use your money against you and, from initial looking, NextGen is providing the same services as Pipe at much lower pricing. So...you can never take anything for granted in the Australian communications industry....or if you do, you tend to pay a very heavy price for your insouciance. PS: Some 11 days ago I 'predicted' that EFtel's shares would be less than 1.5 of a cent before the end of March - yesterday they fell to 1.6 cents - a 20% drop in 11 days. The directors can publicly talk up the company as much as they like but the shareholders don't seem to be listening - you have to wonder who buys such shares and what their expectations are? http://www.asx.com.au/asx/markets/equityPrices.do?by=asxCodes&asxCodes=eft
Friday, March 12. 2010Today's, And More Importantly, 'Tomorrow's' Unlimited Scenarios.....John Linton ..........in providing ADSL2 to current and future Exetel customers. At the current pricing of the AAPT unlimited offer of $99.99 and the promised pricing by TPG of something less than that the appeal of this sort of unlimited service remains constrained to something like (and I have no real way of knowing) 10% of the total ADSL user base in Australia - some 600,000 (more probably much less than 500,000) current users. A sizable market but not something that many ISPs are involved in and a problematic demographic in that 'heavy usage' is much more difficult to manage than lower usage. This demographic is also constrained by the fact that the total available market of 6 million ADSL users is constrained by the actual number of exchanges that either AAPT or TPG have ADSL2 DSLAMs installed at. AAPT's obfuscatory pricing (shown at the bottom of this page: http://www.aapt.com.au/services/personal-small-business/personal/legal-unlimited-24/7-adsl2 is, even after reading back and forth a few times not clear to me whether the service is $A100.00 per month or $A110.00 per month. Whatever it is it is priced way out of reach over 90% plus of Australian users and is not going to make much of an impression except on the sort of user who downloads more than 150 gb per month - I wonder just how many of such users pay their own internet bills? So I think the AAPT offer is unimportant at this time though as it will decrease over the coming months it will become more important. TPG's possible $A75.00 (internet only) unlimited plan seems more attractive than AAPT's $A100.00 unlimited plan except the AAPT plan includes phone line rental and TPG's plan doesn't seem to do that - add $A25 - $A30 for a telephone line and.....except that TPG is offering an $11.00 per month (inc $10.00 worth of calls) quasi telephone option via the old Comindico network POIs which is a plus but not clear whether the end user still has to have a Telstra line and what charges TPG will make for telephone calls - all that will become clearer soon - again at $A86.00 per month - not all that exciting to very many users and the detail may be even less so. So....not really much to worry about today....we will lose some high end users which will be a profit neutral or profit plus situation for us so it doesn't really matter. However things won't remain the same and it can be argued that today is just the start of a wider adoption of such offerings by more ISPs as the pricing of IP has fallen so much so quickly and if TPG's bid for Pipe is voted for at today's shareholder meeting TPG will have some interesting numbers to 'crunch'. But what about 'tomorrow'? Exetel would expect to more than halve our current buy prices for IP over the coming months from a mixture of $A125, $A90, $30 (Peerap generated IP) and 'Zero' (Akamai and Peering generated IP) per mbps which gives us a 'blended' cost of sub $100.00 per mbps. If we are successful in the current negotiations this would give us an effective $A35.00 per mbps or an effective per customer gbyte of around 16 cents (ex gst) compared to over 40 cents we pay today. That cost is attractive in yesterday's ISP land but not particularly attractive today and certainly nowhere near good enough moving it to calendar 2011 if the current uncertainties in the residential market places persist. Our major problems remain, as they have always been, the very high prices we pay for ADSL ports and, in the context of the ever downward moving prices of IP - the ludicrously expensive back haul charges we pay. Unless we can reduce port monthly charges by 25% and back haul by 50% IP could be free and we couldn't compete in 'tomorrow's' ADSL2 residential marketplaces. The lower IP costs will help us over the coming 4 - 5 months but almost certainly not beyond that. Whether we can find a realistic supplier of DSLAM ports and sensibly priced back haul is doubtful but slightly more promising than it has been over the past few years. If, and it's a big if, we are successful in our current 'negotiations' we could establish three simple ADSL2 plans along the lines of: 1) ADSL2 (plus telephone line) - $50.00 per month - downloads/uploads @ 50 cents per gb - capped at $A75.00 per month 2) ADSL2 (byo line) - $30.00 per month - downloads/uploads @50 cents per gb - capped at $60.00 per month 3) ADSL2 (naked) - $45.00 per month - download/uploads @ 50 cents per gb - capped at $70.00 per month We are close on two of the elements and a bit too far away on the third element at the moment to make this a 'sure thing' but if we don't succeed in making something like this happen then I'm pretty sure someone else will in the not too distant future. PS: Despite Ludlam's personal lack of knowledge maybe the greens won't rot in hell after all: http://www.smh.com.au/business/telstra-gets-a-break-in-fight-for-its-future-20100311-q1o9.html Thursday, March 11. 2010The Long Predicted 'Clone Wars' Begin To Escalate....John Linton ......with TPG being forced to offer "unlimited" ADSL2 as AAPT's "Unlimited" begins to make TPG's future forecasts subject to revision. You can always tell when a company has been 'caught out' by a competitor - it announces that it will announce in the future some product/plan that will meet the characteristics of some competitor's already released plan. I guess in TPG's case it has to arrange to replace all those bus posters and bill boards it just put up with new ones - is that the 4th time in nine months? Who said the current saturation of the ADSL market wouldn't create a blood bath? The ABS statistics on the state of the Australian ADSL marketplace are not due out until 31st March but the recent price cuts by AAPT and now TPG and the increasing use of 'unlimited' around the marketplaces are pretty indicative that all is not well in ISP prediction land. Apart from the various publicly listed company half year results there have been many other less obvious indications that the sales predictions/revenues/profits of a number of Australian communications companies are far from what they predicted when this financial year began. As I said back in October 2009 (and several times since) the lack of 'natural' growth in the ADSL2 market could only lead to one thing - fierce competition characterised by price cutting. Only Telstra has some sort of protection because its competitors don't have the coverage that Telstra does - although, of course, coverage by AAPT and TPG et alia are in the 'most popular' exchanges in terms of the majority of ADSL users. The most obvious result of AAPT/TPG's unlimited plans will be that it effectively puts a new, much lower, 'cap' on what the high end spenders will be prepared to pay for an internet service - there will be no more plans above $A100.00 per month once the 'dust settles'. Not that that user demographic is very large in the first place and even at the current high prices for those plans they seldom if ever make much or any profit. So AAPT and, when they join the fray, TPG have begun to change the ADSSL market for the better by reducing the cost of ADSL generally. However, even at $A85.00 a month it is still well beyond the budget of the vast majority of ADSL buyers in Australia - I have no way of knowing what that might be but I doubt that it exceeds $A50.00 a month and is much more likely to be $A40.00 a month. I could be totally wrong......I often am. I suppose that TPG is assuming that the shareholder vote tomorrow approves its takeover of Pipe and TPG would then have access to large quantities of 'free' international IP (just as AAPT already has). That would depend on how many of Pipes current users continue to be happy with buying IP and other services from a competitor who is using their purchase monies to destroy their businesses. I wouldn't have thought that too many would do that.....but, as PTB remarked about a different demographic, you can never under estimate the lack of business acumen of Australian communications business managers. It will now be interesting to see what Telstra does - and to a lesser extent what Optus does. Telstra will be the least directly affected of any ISP by these particular events as they would have very few customers who fall into the demographics of 'unlimited usage' customers. However they already have been and will continue to be negatively affected by the repercussions of the 'unlimited' plans on offer because it more starkly contrasts just how massively overpriced Telstra's ADSL offerings are. Similarly Optus plans are now exposed as being far too expensive for far too little. It will depend on whether both those companies 'market guidance' that they both expected to see 'improved results' for the second half of FY2010 are a reality or just wishful thinking.....and, I would imagine, what they are seeing in their new applications and churn aways right now. Not a pretty sight? It isn't all downside though for other communications companies - at least not yet. Firstly, $A85.00 is not going to do all that much apart from costing any company (irrespective of how low cost their IP and connectivity bandwidth is) more than they receive for such plans on average and moving any of their own customers currently paying more than that down to that level. Secondly the percentage of the 'total market' willing to pay $A85.00 per month is likely to be less than 10% (at the very most) and more likely to be somewhere South of 5%. Thirdly, and quite possibly you might think perversely, it will benefit other ISPs who will lose some very small percentage of their heavy users to TPG/AAPT but in doing so will reduce their own operating costs. The problem for other ISPs is a future one, and quite possibly in the very near future, when AAPT/TPG try and make similar offerings at the $A50.00 per month mark. I, on behalf of Exetel, have a very different concern which has nothing to do with 'unlimited' residential ADSL. I am wondering what price changes AAPT/TPG will bring to the business marketplace now they are saying that unlimited IP and connectivity band width costs less than $A85.00? Both of those companies have many thousands of business customers who, I would have thought, would be ringing their account manager putting pressure on those companies to reduce their now massively over charged monthly business services.....and there is no doubt that will begin to happen if it hasn't already. The trouble for AAPT/TPG now is that they have told the world how little it costs to deliver IP to an end user and their business users will now want the same deal - except that would mean a reduction in business revenue of something like 75% - not something share holders would be happy about unless TPG/AAPT could treble or quadruple their take up of new customers. My 'concerns' are purely based on how those companies will 're-position' their business internet plans. Times will, undoubtedly, get tougher in communications land over the coming months and we will have to find some way of providing unlimited plans to our customers without going broke - it needs some 180 degree different way of looking at it as all the ways we've looked at it so far have been un 'doable'.
Wednesday, March 10. 2010Buying Pipe....A Good Decision?John Linton I read a couple of speculation pieces in the Australian financial press over the last two days as to whether the required 75% of Pipe shareholders would approve the $A6.30 per share offer made by TPG to buy the company - the views were similar - probably but not as certain as it once was. I have no idea other than the shares have fallen back in price over the past day or so (I didn't really look before Monday of this week) and it would seem that you could make a quick profit if you thought the offer would go ahead. I really have only one interest in Pipe - which of course is how TPG ownership would affect Exetel in terms of the various circuits we buy from Pipe (our business is less than $A50k a month and we are in the process of replacing $A30k of that with an alternate supplier at a saving of around 40%). It did make me wonder what the Pipe business is actually worth if other customers are being as overcharged as Exetel have been over the past two years and how many of them will either ask for big price reductions or, like Exetel, be concerned enough take their business elsewhere anyway. Steve has been dealing with various IP suppliers as part of our contract review process and is finding some surprising 'bids' that also make me wonder just what Pipe's revenues are likely to be in the future if the information he is seeing is going to continue a trend. A year ago we were paying around $A180.00 for 'pure' IP traffic. By July of last year that had fallen to $A125 per mbps and by November it had dropped to $A90 per mbps. By January pricing had fallen to $A70.00 and the quotes that Steve is now negotiating are around $A60.00 per mbps - a fall of 66% in less than 12 months. Now clearly if these sort of prices are being offered to Exetel then you would have to assume that companies with larger IP usage would be getting better offers - unless they are foolishly tied in to long term contracts for some reason or another. Exetel currently 'deploys' almost 6 gbps of IP - 4.5 gbps of 'pure' IP with another 1.5 gbps from our Akamai, PeerApp and peering resources.....a fair bit for a company of our size but much less, one would assume, than the larger communications providers. However it is reaching/has reached a size where we can consider buying directly from either Southern Cross or one of the newer entrants into the Australian marketplace. The 'difficulty' of buying direct is the up front costs that, depending on the source of the IP, varies between $A3 million and $A5 million. They are hefty sums of money but deliver bandwidth at prices below $A50.00 per mbps in the first 2 - 3 years falling to less than $A10.00 per mbps in years 4 - 15 - at least that's what it appears to be without going through the contract in detail. At $A10.00 per mbps the cost per gigabyte delivered to the customer (for the IP portion) is around 5 cents a gigabyte compared to around 35 cents today....a huge difference for end customers who download large amounts of data. While there is a big up front (big for a company of Exetel's size) payment required it would mean that we could reduce our 'pure' IP cost by 75% from what we were paying in March last year and still pay much less after paying back the money we would have to borrow plus the interest. (around $A40,000 per gbps per month) I guess that's what TPG found attractive about the Pipe deal. But, and there's always a 'but'. If IP prices continue to fall as they have over the past year, and I think I am beginning to get a glimmer of an understanding of why that might be the case, today's deal is not as good as it sounds - even ignoring the risks of borrowing $A4 million in a very difficult marketplace. It seems likely that the cost of buying IP will be lower next year than the $A45.00 that the 'purchase your own IP' deal (ignoring the cost of paying back the money and interest) has locked you into for three years. The SX deal, while up front more expensive provides much lower pricing 'today' than $A45.00 per mbps (perhaps half of that if you extend the loan term beyond three years) but never quite gets you to sub $A10.00 per mbps. The trouble always is - trying to work out what price IP will be each six months as time passes - and, of course, what amount you will need in 3+ years time - maybe not as much as you need today. Then again.....IP and intra-capital city prices might not fall further and all sorts of other things may change in this very difficult year. Perhaps the Pipe owners and shareholders who have already sold their shares made a very good decision. PS: Another straw in the wind indicating no market for an 'NBNN2' that could never be sold at the price it would cost: Tuesday, March 9. 2010Eliminating Customer ComplaintsJohn Linton We began a program some 9 months ago to eliminate, as far as that is possible in contemporary Australian society, 'complaints' about anything that we had a reasonable degree of control over. It would be nice to be able to aim at eliminating complaints completely but that can never be possible because there are several aspects of providing communications services that require actions by organisations and people over which we have no control. There are also a small percentage of people to whom we, or any other company, provides services that will always find something to complain about. We have been working on the Exetel User Facilities since the day we opened for business and have continued to build in functionality and refine current tools as we get suggestions from customers or come up with our own ideas. Based on the feedback from customers who transfer to Exetel from other ISPs our user facilities are far more comprehensive than those of other ISPs. Our aim is to provide our customers with easy to use tools to allow them to do many things themselves that require them to call the help desk of other ISPs to carry out for them....everybody wins from this approach. I read this article earlier today: http://blogs.wsj.com/wallet/2009/08/05/how-to-complain-about-a-company/tab/article/ which offers some sound advice to people who believe they have a legitimate complaint and also read the associated articles such as this one: http://www.bbb.org/us/Consumer-Complaints/Statistics/ which gives a very valuable perspective on the 'trends' in the USA. Compared to 9 months ago our program to reduce complaints has produced some encouraging results in that monthly complaints have approximately halved over that period. So it is possible to analyse what is causing customers to legitimately complain and address the core reasons that are producing complaints/queries. It's a fairly simple process and easy enough to eliminate complaint types once you have identified the root cause and agree that it isn't the way you want to run your business. When you find something you are doing wrong it is only a matter of changing a procedure or eliminating a source of annoyance to eliminate future complaints. Since we started Exetel we have worked on automating as much of the customer information and support processes as possible which, after six years of continuous work, are as good as we can get them. In combination with that automation we have now been able to reduce call wait times to the lowest in the Australian industry and we like to think that this recent feedback (today) illustrates what can be achieved via the automation process and only hiring very knowledgeable engineers to provide support: I would like to say a big thank you for the excellent fast service I have received since submitting my new application last week I am new customer and can advise I am all up and running within 4 business days of submitting my new ADSL2+ application. I have been very impressed with everything thus far such as:
Great Windows 7/vista Gadget for net usage A vast amount of options and info in the my account log in section.
The only thing I couldn't easily find is where positive feedback should be directed. I have sent this email to this address as I didn't know where else to send it though wanted to let someone know my new user experience.
Something to aim at. PS: More speculation on where Telstra currently stands on selling its PSTN: Monday, March 8. 2010One Thing Krudd's Most Idiotic Pipe Dream So Far Has Done.......John Linton .......has made me appreciate that, incomprehensible as it may seem for someone like like me to reach this view, dealing with Telstra is almost certainly going to be preferable to dealing with some new communications monopoly owned and operated by the Federal Government. It seems that the almost 20 years that have passed since the promulgation of the Telecommunications Act is long enough for everyone, most obviously the duplicitous tossers who seek access to the trough, to forget what a really bad idea it was to have the government of the day (whose idea of long term thinking is how to retain access to the trough at the next election) involved in directing the activities of the national telecommunications provider. I am absolutely no fan of almost anything Telstra does, at least in terms of its dealings with Exetel, which is why we have begun to use the courts in an attempt to get redress for the most obvious of their operational inequities. There is no question that Telstra remains an organisation that is unbelievably hard to deal with and has reached a stage of contented bloatedness where even one of its legal representatives laughed without a hint of ruefulness at the concept that Telstra might like to act in a timely way to the matters being discussed and he thought that was an "OK" attitude for him/Telstra to take. His comment, which I can't remember verbatim, was to the effect that "Oh well, you are dealing with Telstra you know" which apparently made it "OK" to disadvantage a small company "because that's what we do". So I have no liking nor any respect for people who have been tainted by their employer's approach to business generally. Given the state of Telstra today - a government monopoly that has had 20 years to become something different via legislation, the yapping at its heels of a half dozen or so foreign carriers and the ministrations of the ACCC - no-one with two brain cells to rub together could regard the creation of a new government communications monopoly with anything but horror. It really is a case of "don't those morons ever learn anything?" If you have any sort of sense of humour you must be laughing at the current unedifying concept of that union stand over thug (Krudd's cat's paw Conroy) telling Telstra that their monopoly is bad for Australia and it's to be fixed by one monopoly handing over its monopoly operations to a new monopoly - talk about Alice in Wonderland. Talking about Wonderland, or some land that must be even lower beneath the surface of the Earth than Telstra and the Federal Government of the day exist, unlike where the majority of humanity resides, there is some other even more ridiculously unaccountable organisation that makes it difficult to believe that the Australian communications industry isn't filled with even more incredible creatures than Cheshire cats, mad hatters and Red Queens. I am referring, of course, to the TIO. As I mentioned the other day - Exetel has attempted for some two years to get the TIO to act as its "charter" determines that it should act with no success. We most recently sent them a sample of over 300 instances where they (the TIO) had acted in ways that, without a shadow of a doubt, were against their own unequivocally clear guidelines which they subsequently agreed were 'errors' on their part and "credited Exetel for the charges they had made in error". However they refused to accept that the examples we provided were anything but "errors" that were not an indication that there was anything wrong with the calibre and knowledge, the training or the supervision of TIO personnel who had committed those errors even though we advised them that they were merely samples of more than three hundred other identical situations. So, denial and obfuscation and the privileged cloak of 'we can do exactly as we like' (as stated to Exetel by more than one TIO employee) makes litigation the only course available to companies like Exetel....which we have now formally begun. Apart from the waste of money and time, which is not inconsiderable, the bad taste in your mouth that is generated by being on the end of Telstra's and the TIO's communications makes business life unnecessarily unpleasant. I have had enough direct and observational experience of the Australian 'justice system' to never predict the outcome of any given piece of litigation but I have no doubt whatsoever of the unequivocal correctness of facts we are providing to the various courts involved and have no ability or knowledge to doubt the advice of the counsel our solicitors consulted in preparing the cases. A feral prime minister and feral government ordained organisations makes business life in the Australian communications industry more complicated, and expensive, than it needs to be.
Sunday, March 7. 2010Age Does Weary Everyone........EventuallyJohn Linton I'm not sure whether its' old age or the demands of managing the future of a small but continuingly growing company that passed the $A50 million annual revenue mark some time ago and now has over 90 professional career oriented employees in 2 countries but I have hired a 'research assistant' to take over the market analysis parts of my job that I have carried out since we 'converted' Exetel into a service provider (from a consulting company) some six years ago. I have been trying, with some success, to devolve a number of my responsibilities to other people within Exetel for almost two years and I think that would have reduced my personal workload except for the fact that Exetel has continued to grow and the markets in which we operate have continued to become more difficult. We have also slowly increased the range of services we provide which has continued to increase the amount of reading required. My many hours per day, 7 days a week,work routines includes around 30 hours of 'market/product/service analysis' and I simply can't fit it in recently (I don't know how long "recently" is but I notice I don't have precise enough information these days). As we depend on that market place knowledge it is past time to correct that situation. From the first year we were in business we have always been lucky to have extremely bright 'interns' apply to us each November whom we have given internships to with alacrity. We have hired three of these interns over that time and have been 'blessed' with the intellectual power they have brought to the company. We would have liked to have hired all of them over the past six years but we had no positions that would have begun to utilise their intellectual needs and desires. We have offered the job to another very bright intern who has worked with us over the past four months who apart from her unbroken excellent school academic record and sporting success ending with a distinction 'ridden' transcript is from Sri Lanka although she came to Australia as a young girl before returning to complete high school in Colombo and then again returning to Australia to complete her under graduate degree. She is currently completing her internship in the Sri Lanka office preparing some legal documentation for Exetel's law suit against the TIO. I haven't been in a position to use help in the daily tasks I have performed up to now, partly because of our attitude to keeping personnel costs to a minimum and partly my convoluted way of working that makes it difficult to separate some tasks from the overall workload. However it has become essential and when something has to be done the previous barriers preventing it, magically immediately disappear. I have done this twice before in my 'career' with mixed, but overall positive, success and I am hoping I have learned enough from the previous experiences and glaring mistakes to make this iteration completely successful. Time will tell. As I mentioned it in passing - our solicitors served the TIO with our 'demands' last Thursday relating to over 300 instances of incorrect charging and vexatious behaviour. It has taken much longer to produce the documentation because, effectively, Larry and co have had to 'educate' both our solicitors and Senior Counsel on the detail of how the TIO processes work (or in the cases cited - don't work) and then re-produce all the case notes, email exchanges with the TIO, recorded calls to and from the TIO in the format required to take before a court. I am grateful to have played no part in the long, tedious and time consuming processes. Perhaps it is a litigation dominant period in Exetel's life as we also submitted the first of two legal actions against Telstra last week to the court to request a hearing date and the second case will be submitted before the end of March. Life always seems to me to be a bit like that - no sooner do you get around to addressing one problem another two appear.
Saturday, March 6. 2010
Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose Posted by John Linton
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Comments (12) Trackbacks (0) Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme ChoseJohn Linton
http://public.mrtg.exetel.com.au/bwsummary/total-supplier-bandwidth.html and scroll down to the bottom of the first four MRTG reports. You will see that the average IP usage by Exetel customers has doubled on average over the past year and that (from the top graph on that page) it now peaks at around 5.5 gbps briefly twice a day. 12 months ago we were paying close enough to double what we are paying for IP bandwidth today which reduced by around 25% in August last year and all bandwidth we purchased from November onwards we paid around 50% of what we paid in March 2009. On a 'melded' basis we are paying around 35% less for bandwidth (per mbps) than we did 12 months ago but we are using double what we used 12 months ago. However our other costs, ADSL port charges, customer connectivity bandwidth have not reduced over that time and our support costs have risen as we move towards meeting the 1 minute call wait times we aspire to be providing by mid 2010. We are in the final stages of selecting a 'short list' of suppliers to deal with post July 1 this year and there are some new vendors that we are considering although, as almost always in business, our preference is to stay with people we know and have some reasonable knowledge of. IP, as always, continues to fall. This is partly due to our continually growing purchase volumes and partly because there are significant technology advances for the cable owners that lower their operating and delivery costs - (more capacity on the same physical infra-structure). Similarly the cost of inter-State connectivity continues to fall with some well overdue falls to some of the 'smaller' locations. So we would expect to be able to obtain significant discounts in both IP and inter-State transits post July 1st but, as you would see from the MRTG reports in the user facilities month on month growth in customer usage leaves the cost per customer pretty much the same even if , over a year, you manage to reduce those costs by 50%. Our major problem is the actual port monthly rental costs and the cost of the port provider's bandwidth cost between the customer exchanges and our POIs. It is absolutely unfathomable for me to understand that we we now buy IP at a slightly cost than the carrier's charge us for back haul from their exchanges. At today's IP rates of sub $A70.00 for IP and falling towards $A50.00 we will soon be paying 20/30% less to get data from the other side of the world than we do for data from 2 kms away.These costs remain disproportionately high and mean that even at a notional $A1.00 per month profit it is difficult to keep the costs of providing ADSL services to residential customers above break even without the constant 'micro-management' that sometimes annoys some percentage of current customers at any given time. We intend to address that issue differently this year after failing to make any progress over the past 5 years and we will either get what is reasonable or we will radically re-think our approaches to residential marketplaces - there are a number of different scenarios we could consider. We want to complete our 'short list' of possible suppliers for FY2011 and also 'short list' our market approaches by Friday week so that we have a realistic time frame to bring about whatever changes are decided before the last of our current contracts are up in late August. That is a tough time frame for some of the people we are talking with who find our approach to 'negotiating' unusual (no meetings and discussions - just a reply to our RFP in writing with any questions put and answered by email) and definitely no "what price are you looking for" nonsense. It always surprises me that so many large companies are so 'flexible' in their pricing that it can vary so widely. I wonder why they do that? I learned a really hard lesson on the last trip to Sri Lanka. In the 'negotiations' we had for the rental cost of the new floor space and then for its fit out I asked for, with no negotiation permitted, pricing that was 20 - 30% better than that being offered - and got my asking price. It showed me what a complete fool I had been when we first went there and got completely ripped off in our total naivety. I don't intend to continue to make that mistake in paying far too much to Australian suppliers as we have for the past six years. It is humiliating to realise how incompetent I have been all these years and how much more difficult my incompetence has therefore made it for Exetel to survive let alone grow. No fool like an old fool describes the last six years perfectly. Maybe I just don't understand this industry now? Maybe I never did? Friday, March 5. 2010If VoIP Is Now 'Destroying' Fixed Line Revenue.......John Linton .....what will MoIP do to mobile telephone call revenue? I read sometime in mid January that Apple was now allowing Skype to be used on the iPhone (via its 'appstore') after presumably ending the embargo period imposed by the carriers around the world who were given rights to sell the Apple iphone product. I got my 'final' version of Exetel's MoIP app yesterday on my Nokia N96 and was delighted with it in terms of the few small improvements over the previous versions which I have been successively using for the past year or so. I called the UK, WA, two rural areas of Australia and a range of 1300 and 1800 numbers all with perfect results. So although I use Exetel's "standard" mobile service which provides very low cost calls I am now using the lowest cost mobile service I have ever used with absolutely no 'quality' difference between it and my previous Optus mobile service. Not such a big deal you might think - from Fring and Nimbuzz back in July 2008 and hundreds of similar apps onward there are any number of such offerings around the world - which is true. But there haven't been that many with servers/switches based in Australia and they did come with various issues in that we didn't write the code and therefore have access to it to integrate future applications into it nor did it run on switches that we owned. Anyway I was impressed with it and we will now start promoting it to our current and future wireless users that have compatible hand sets. Anyone who has read my comments about mobile 'capped plans' would know that I have never understood their appeal and I don't wish to waste time re-expressing my bewilderment about that marketing concept and why it works. I do wonder whether 10 cent unlimited time calls to wire lines, 15 cents a minute calls to mobiles and 5 cent SMS will do anything to affect how the carriers see future pricing once/if MoIP becomes as established in the mobile user's mind as VoIP is now established in the wire line user's mind? As wire line call charges are progressively seen as irrelevant and expensive by telephone handset users and are forcing Telstra to contemplate how to deal with that ongoing situation what will happen to the mobile carrier's future revenue plans if they are based on ever increasing call revenues? I am a very modest maker of outbound mobile calls and I never use out bound SMS but my modest mobile bill would drop by 2/3 using MoIP with very little increase in the data component of my monthly charges. So, as usual in my direct way, I can't see any reason why any buyer of an Exetel wireless phone plan for use in a mobile hand set wouldn't also buy an Exetel MoIP service plus an Exetel SMS service. What would be the point of paying double or treble for such services if there is a simple alternative? The mobile carriers saw this issue very clearly in the 'early days of HSPA' and managed, at that time, to get the hand set makers to 'disable' the use of MoIP under the threat of not buying their gigantic volumes from them - but that has long been discontinued. So if the carriers can't prevent end users preferring MoIP over their 'capped' plans what will they do if call mobile call revenues go the same way wire line call revenues? I have no idea and have more than enough problems of my own to give it any further thought. I suppose the other issue in this general scenario is the 'threat' to the mobile carrier's 'call' revenues of SMS over IP at sub ten cents per message from many sources (Exetel offers it for 5 cents). From what I read the mobile carriers make a large percentage of their mobile profits from SMS with it not being uncommon to see charges in excess of 20 cents per SMS. I don't use SMS but I have tried Exetel's version and it seems no different to the 'embedded' SMS provided as a standard service on my Exetel/Optus service. I think combining SMS over IP with MoIP would be a very compelling offering to many user types....from school children on upwards. That's the trouble with technology - it abhors a status quo. Thursday, March 4. 2010It's Nice To Be Right Occasionally.....John Linton ....and it always seemed to me (and I have been 'on the record' on this for over three years) that the future of 'nation wide broad band' always had to include rural and regional wireless. So it 'gladdened my heart' to read this earlier this morning Now, my knowledge and experience is miniscule compared to the big US carriers that provided the information to the FCC on how to improve the deployment of broad band availability to the US population and I am, very definitely, not claiming any sort of ability to 'see the future' but simply reaching the obvious conclusions from the available data that wireless is the obvious solution to providing high speed broadband in rural areas. The article also, yet again, calls in to question the un-costed assumption by Krudd that a 'national' (which more and more obviously excludes rural Australia) broad band infrastructure will cost an estimated $A43 billion when the FCC thinks some $US25 billion will deliver high speed broadband to 100 million homes (not 'premises') by some yet to be agreed date but estimated as being 2020. Of course, until the full report is available to be read it's impossible to determine what exactly is being proposed and how any federal funding will be used to support the current carriers own network build outs. I don't know where the estimate of 4% of US citizens in rural areas can't get high speed broadband comes from and that number alone represents around 50% of Australia's total population. Compared to the current reduction in the 'NBN2' scope "to connect up to 90% of Australian premises when it is complete". (10% of Australian premises leaves an awful lot of country Australia without the 'benefits' of 'NBN2' unless I am misunderstanding the meaning of that phrase......which is quite possible). As someone who uses wireless internet everywhere but the office I am obviously 'biased' in my assessment of how useful wireless is compared to wire line internet. Exetel has a small, but continually growing, business wireless user base who provide all of their personnel (the largest of these has well over 100 people) with wireless internet only for their travel and home use and have canceled all of the land line connections they used to provide to many of those personnel. Similarly we have a small, but continually growing, 'stream' of our own long term low end ADSL users who buy an Exetel wireless service and subsequently cancel their ADSL service and usually their wire line telephone line too. Despite all of the statements made by people with deeply vested interests internet needs are widely diverse in Australia, and I would think, all other countries across the globe. Without being in any way some sort of communications 'Luddite' or someone who hasn't been around the data transfer industry for very long (my first experience was using a 2400 baud terminal connected via telephone to an IBM mainframe in the late 1960s) I really don't see the need for 100% of Australians (excluding rural and much of regional Australia) to have a 100 mbps fibre link as the best solution to their internet needs. Without being able to second guess the future development of 'on line' applications I very much doubt that even 50% of the Australian population would be willing, and in many cases, able to pay for a 100 mbps fibre service no matter how much it is subsidised by the tax payers. Such a view, which is not only held by some "ignorant has been" (nice of the person who described me in those terms recently not to use "never was" I suppose) like me, is clouded at the moment by the cost of wireless services in Australia and, to a lesser extent, by the deliverable speeds of today's wireless services. However today's costs are some 25% of what they were only two years ago and widespread deliverable speeds are approaching 8 times what they were two years ago - a 32 times service improvement over far less than 3 years. By all means quibble with those numbers but that is what I have achieved over that period and I am certain my experience is widely shared. As a comparison, and only based on Exetel's buy prices, ADSL speeds have not increased at all over the past 3 years and costs of providing services have remained static - no 32x improvement for that technology which is understandable because it is reaching, if it hasn't already reached, the end of its useful life which is made more likely, at least in Australia, by the cost/profit structures of the two main ADSL infrastructure owners. So clearly fibre is a logical replacement of PSTN based residential internet services...assuming an end user can afford it and has a future need for it. Telstra and Optus (and their part owned Foxtel) have been providing fibre services to residential users for more than a decade (closer to 15 years I think) and both Telstra and Optus continue to build out their fibre networks in Sydney and Melbourne currently. Nothing new about providing fibre to hundreds of thousands (over a million?) of capital city dwellers and the costs of doing that are obviously well known to at least three large Australian providers of data, telephone and entertainment services. But those suppliers have never given any indication that it is financially feasible to build a fibre infrastructure outside capital cities and most reasonable people would have to assume they would have a sound basis for making that judgment. However there's no point in being right (assuming I am) when decisions are made based on totally different criteria. PS: Telstra's future continues to be damaged by the proposed legislation currently in limbo in the Senate: http://www.smh.com.au/business/broker-downgrade-wont-bode-well-for-telstra-20100303-pj79.html
Wednesday, March 3. 2010Operating In A Declining Marketplace.........John Linton ....presents a set of problems/challenges that requires a simple, but far reaching, question to be asked by any small company of itself....why do I need to be here? If you assume that the current government will be re-elected later this year then it seems inevitable, irrespective of what Telstra manages to do about separation and selling its PSTN to Krudd's pipe dream, the 'NBN2' will lumber on and less and less companies will invest in adding ADSL2 DSLAM capacities around the country and ADSL generally will go past the 'flat growth' stage and, because of faster and lower cost wireless broadband, will decline at some as yet unknown rate. While the 'NBN2' even under a continuing government may never actually continue to exist, even as a pipe dream, the effect it will have on the ADSL market will be severe and if, by some tax payer funding it actually delivers some sort of service it will kill ADSL completely over time but while it slowly does that the ADSL market will continue to shrink more rapidly. Under almost any scenario I can conceive (and I would be the first to agree that my ability to comprehend how this can be happening is far from comprehensive) there is no place for small communications companies like Exetel in such a set of marketplaces. Of course, if I hadn't lost my pair of rose coloured glasses some time ago I could imagine that the ongoing 'NBN2' would wholesale services to Exetel at a similar cost as Optus and AAPT do today and that Exetel would be able to use its very low operating costs to be able to continue to offer residential internet services with a seamless changeover from the ADSL2 services we offer today. Perhaps, despite all the obvious reservations that will be the case.....and it may very well turn out like that or even the alternative that the 'NBN2' comes to a halt under either the current or a future government......but in the meantime and that meantime is likely to last for at least 12 months the current ADSL uncertainty will continue to exist with all of the current and likely immediate future problems. While I'm really glad that we made the decision not to proceed with the very attractive DSLAM proposal we came so close to accepting some two years ago and don't have the additional financial and operational concerns of paying off a large debt against static/falling customer levels that would have entailed, it doesn't really help us much. Our key issue is to manage to 'improve' our current ADSL offerings and to retain the current current levels (or in my better dreams continue to grow them) while the current scenarios become clearer and to survive the changes that are an inevitability in a saturated or declining marketplace. This is not something I have, personally, nor Exetel more generally has had any experience in dealing with. Dealing with the reactions by the major companies to falling customer levels is going to be the most difficult because they will be continuous and continuously unpredictable. We also need to change our approach to the ADSL residential marketplace from the base tenets we have used for the past six years relatively successfully. We have already gone a long way towards doing that in terms of providing 16 hour a day support (365 days a year) that has the fastest answer times of any ISP in Australia and as each month goes by the experience levels and competence of that operation continue to increase. That's something we didn't have before very recently. We have also, in pure download for money terms, significantly increased the 'value proposition' of our new plans and have significantly changed our Australian network to deliver those increased volumes - a two year plan that has now been, largely, completed. So both our network and our support capabilities are very different to what they were two years ago. I am of the opinion that Exetel's residential support, sales and provisioning operations are now better than those of any other ISP in Australia and are widening the gap. We also, in these ever more difficult times need to change at least some of the market demographics we are most attractive to.....which is the hardest thing for us to move away from....because it will disrupt a part of our current user base. But, in these likely rapidly shrinking 'sun set' years of ADSL continuing to do what we have done for the past six years simply isn't going to work. One thing we have to do is to remove all of the discontinued plans that lose us money which, over time have built up as we made a decision some 3 years ago to not 'force' customers to change plans when we introduced new plans and we now have a situation where over 50% of our current customers don't even make us the $1.00 per month profit we have always aimed for....more than a few of those plans lose us more than $A5.00 a month and we must remedy that situation. Whatever happens with the 'NBN2' and whatever happens with the developments of wireless broadband and whatever Telstra and Optus do with their own fibre roll outs in the major capital cities (which appear to be continuing to happen) the 'picture' forming for ADSL2 over the next six months is one of significant change and the changes are likely to have a large impact on all sorts of current providers of residential ADSL services. Tuesday, March 2. 2010How Dangerous Are The Current Times......John Linton ....if you are a minor company competing in Communications Land? I briefly read EFTel's six monthly report which may be found here: http://www.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20100301/pdf/31p02r2f8j6m0s.pdf and saw that the much tougher times in the ADSL marketplaces are claiming their first victim. If you can be bothered to read them - they are the sorriest set of numbers that it seems possible to report and still be in business. I am constantly surprised, each year, that this tiny company continues to report significant, for its overall revenue, losses each six months yet remain in business. It reported a 3.35% drop in revenue over the period and a loss of $A985,000 in the six month period which wiped out the previously cobbled together asset backing to a negative 1 cent a share on shares that traded yesterday at an (almost) all time low of 2 cents. Presumably every shareholder who is not closely associated with the company has already sold their shares before they are completely worthless. It gets worse once you move past the first page. You will see that the current cash and debtors (and debtors for such a tiny company are alarmingly high at $A3,444,000 (meaning more than $A2 million of that money is in 60 days and beyond and therefore of doubtful collectability) and even assuming the amount of debtors is collectible combined 'liquid assets' are well below current accounts payable which are listed as being $A6,243,000. That lamentable situation results, among other things, in accumulated losses for the business approaching $A30 million and an audit that cautions that the company may not continue to survive (PKF letter reproduced on page 18). Notable, by its absence, is any of the usual up beat 'hype' that has always accompanied the half year and annual reports from EFTel (a euphemism for complete fiction) - it seems with numbers like these it has defeated even the rhinoceros hided 'creative' skills of any EFTel director to describe the last six months as anything but a total disaster. Pity - the commentary and Powerpoint slide show always makes amusing reading. There are probably more companies at the lower end of the ISP and communications market that have half year accounts that follow EFTel's in telling a story of extremely difficult marketplaces and dangerously exposed financial resources. When the very large companies (even Telstra) report tough times it is pretty certain that those tough times are going to be reflected pretty much all the way down to the very smallest communications companies and while there will always be a few exceptions there won't be many. Will EFTel continue to survive as it has been able to do after reporting similar dire results each year for the past five years? I wouldn't have a clue as the company's balance sheet and operating results always resemble a wasteland from my limited knowledge perspective and it has continued to 'walk on financial water' for many years now. The major shareholders kicked in around $A1.7 million a few months ago to keep it alive and you would have to think they would not want to lose a big chunk of their remaining cash assets (assuming they didn't borrow the money against pledged assets). However they have already burned through $A400,000 of that money and at their current rate of losing a million every six months and with an already stretched creditors payment schedule life at the accounts department at EFTel must be pretty miserable.....and that sort of misery doesn't stay confined to the accounts department in a tiny company. With the share price continuing to fall it will almost certainly head towards sub 2 cents in March and once that happens the company is effectively worthless with only the owner/directors and related entities holding on to shares in EFTel. I think, irrespective of how tiny and irrelevant EFTel is, their results are the first tangible indications that "the writing is clearly on the wall" in terms of just how difficult life is about to become for almost every company in the communications business and unless you have a balance sheet like Telstra's or Optus then it's probably past time to look to marketplaces other than ADSL for the future survival of your business. With the increase of 'unlimited ADSL plans at increasingly lower prices it isn't difficult to see what is going to happen - and hasn't been for many months now. It's time to begin getting out of the residential ADSL business for any company that doesn't have very, very sound current financials and even sounder access to more money. The 'trick' is, of course, how to do that for many companies currently in those market places? I have my own ideas but I am beginning to think that the time frames are shorter than I had thought. Then again I am often wrong but I don't think that it would be wise to ignore the fact that it's past time to raise our prices for ADSL services to something more financially comfortable than they are now. On the unrelated topic of providing high levels of support to residential ADSL customers I was amused by something sent to me from the iinet web site showing that the likely wait time for telephone support yesterday was 53 minutes and 40 seconds: https://toolbox.iinet.net.au/cgi-bin/callwaiting.cgi As you may know Exetel has been executing a program for the past two years to make our end user support the best available from any Australian communications provider and we are approaching our goal of providing support with a less than 60 second answer time. Exetel are much closer to answering any support telephone call in less than a minute than we have ever been as can be seen here: http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewforum.php?f=324&sid=2c2c5a82f0afc554f4f8534528f355fa |
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