John Linton
.........particularly, when it has had as hard a life as mine.
I don't know what came over me yesterday but in the middle of our monthly board meeting presentations from the various heads of departments I felt the need to ask our Financial Controller to make a note to contact Dell to see what might be able to be done in supplying note books (with built in wireless broadband sim slots) in the upcoming financial year. The topics we were talking about at the time bore no relation to that subject, or anything related to to it, and the words were out of my mouth before I was really aware I was verbalising them. Old age and too many martinis, single malts and mature (and far too many immature) reds has clearly taken an even greater toll that I had thought.
The very last thing that Exetel needs now is to start offering hardware - it's as ludicrous an idea as Exetel rolling out a DSLAM network. I have no idea why such a possibility entered my head but I am assuming it was caused by the wide ranging thinking we are trying to apply to next year's business plan and to deal with the issues involved in dealing with today's ADSL marketplaces. Either that or something more serious. In any event I thought about 'hardware' for most of yesterday - not notebooks as I realise that is actually not even a vague possibility for Exetel. I didn't have any even vaguely useful thoughts but it did remind me that it's never sensible to go down any commercial path that has been 'well trodden' by previous entities - which reminded me, if I needed any reminding, that ADSL has reached the end of the line for Exetel in terms of us being able to innovate or even strongly differentiate.
It would be really good if the likely future of fibre availability for residential users was even a little clearer than it is today - but, at least to me, it isn't clear at all. The Coalitions ever stronger statements that if they win the next election (unlikely but becoming more possible) they will cancel the NBN (except for Tasmania) is sensible and I have always agreed that the 'gubmant' is a pointless participant in commercial life in any country. However, from purely Exetel's selfish point of view, it would be better for the 'gubmant' to continue trying to compete with Telstra on fibre delivery to allow some competition in keeping fibre prices lower than they would be if there was only one network - I know, ruin the country financially for the benefit of one insignificant commercial entity - pretty unreasonable.
But it is the key issue to the next year and the one after that in terms of residential data services. Our micro experience over the last four days of how interested people will be in fibre, even at Telstra's prices, is a lot higher than I would have thought even at my most optimistic level of expectations. Based on the size of the target market place, our efforts over six plus years in offering ADSL and what we have seen so far we would acquire treble or quadruple our ADSL market share in a few weeks! Of course, what has happened over the past four days is NOT indicative of what will happen in fibre take up elsewhere but it IS interesting. What will be very useful, as a guide, is whether or not, and if we do - how quickly, we reach the number of ADSL customers we had in Point Cook. It won't be directly comparable in that there is no Optus or TPG to compete with and the other claimed participants (iinet, Internode, Dodo) don't seem to be at all organised with no facility on their respective web sites to place orders (TW told us that Exetel were the only participant placing fibre wholesale orders) - but it will be interesting to see how Exetel's "radical" plan structures go against the might of Telstra's marketing efforts when we are the only offers to the market - that's a new luxury for us.
So the fibre opportunities are going to sway, in some considerable ways, what happens in the ADSL market places over the coming two years and those decisions in turn depend on no change in government and what comes to pass from the 'NBN2Co' and Telstra 'discussions' and any subsequent legal actions. With only six weeks to go until the start of the new financial year it seems quite likely that none of that information will be known. So no hard ware aspirations for Exetel but a very big 'conundrum' in terms of what fibre services may or may not turn out to be over the coming year.
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