John Linton
....remind me of the bad old days of 2001 for some reason.........
Most of yesterday was taken up with planning the 'trials' of the fibre services and getting the necessary back hauls and other functionality activated in three States as well as putting in place the systems required to process orders and track provisioning. Fault reporting and fault resolution are not as clearly defined as they need to be (in my view) but perhaps the suppliers take the view that they will never have a fault - more likely I haven't understood the documentation correctly.
With the proposed Telstra, Point Cook, 'trial' beginning next Monday we have very little time to finalise our various offerings over the three 'networks' in terms of activation and ongoing pricing. As the Telstra based services will be provided over our current Telstra inter-connect infrastructure and we will use the same B2B interfaces it will be much easier to put that in place than the other two - however Telstra's pricing is unexciting and, as with their ADSL services, there is little we can do to make it attractive to end users - it seems to me that Telstra continues to live in a world which only peripherally intersects with the world Exetel lives in.....then again perhaps it's simply that Exetel has unreasonable expectations.
We had hoped to have 'one' fibre plan basis for all three providers but there seem to be too many differences between both the various providers and the huge difference in back haul and IP costs in Tasmania - at least as far as our operations are concerned. In looking at the different providers pricing structures and then looking at the 'early' pricing of those ISPs who have released end user pricing the same sort of 'dreariness' is being applied to fibre as is being applied to ADSL - unsurprising in many ways I suppose - but oddly disappointing.
Over the next few days we will finalise the Telstra pricing and put it on the web site in time for the 10th May 'release' and will finalise the Opticomm and Tasmania pricing some time next week. We will work out a way of making the potential buyers in these geographically disparate, and very small, areas aware of our 'offerings' by the end of the week and start the processes involved early next week. Again these will have to be different to anything we have done so far and, like all new approaches, will have some doubt as to their efficacy.
Our principal 'technical' issue is how to provide VoIP as simply as possible and, of course, as cost effectively as possible. Some insight in to the greed of other ISPs has become evident in the early pricing of VoIP for fibre customers and other even more unforgivable rip offs. It seems that fibre services will not be a 'new' start but just a continuation of 'gut the sucker' pricing practices. It will be interesting to see the "public's" reaction, or come to think of it the reaction of the Australian media, should those practices ever subsequently come to light. This has become not a nice industry to be associated with over the last few years. Perhaps it never was and I just didn't notice.
The principal 'unknown' (at least to us) in these exercises is what take up there will be of VoIP services and the hardware required to make VoIP painless for the non-technical end user. This also involves what 'support' should be provided for VoIP and on what basis that support should be provided. In theory every fibre broadband user should use VoIP for their telephone calls as they will have no PSTN. Obviously some customers will elect to use their mobile(s) as their only method of making and receiving telephone calls and it may well be the case that fibre customers will never use a 'conventional' hand set to make telephone calls in the future. It is one of the key differences between providing fibre services and providing ADSL services and, I think, it will be THE issue to be addressed successfully.....and I haven't got a clue as to how to do it. Right now - I am of the opinion that VoIP 'support' should be charged for but I have a feeling that is going to be too "brave" a decision right now - though I am firmly of the opinion that it is going to become necessary in the not too distant future.
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