John Linton
.....is getting more difficult with the 'mists' seeming to be thickening into the first signs of 'fogs'.
I spent some time yesterday thinking about how we get through the next six months or so given that the changes in the ADSL and wireless marketplaces are more likely to intensify than abate. I have been looking at what we could possibly do in the wireless market places since February and each time I get some sort of idea of what is happening...it immediately changes. At the current price offers by the two major carriers are based at $10.00 as far as I can see and our buy pieces are far more than that - not to mention a very high monthly connection fee. I know that the average usage for an Exetel 2 gbyte user is seldom much above 1 gbyte and if you have the size user bases that Telstra and Optus have doubtless that average drops.
We need to increase our wireless broadband user base and we need to do it far more rapidly than we have been able to do that so far. We are beginning to make some progress in the business marketplace and we will continue those efforts and try and make much more of the customer portal we have developed. While we are beginning to get a steady stream of 10 unit sales to businesses we really need a steady and increasing stream of the 50+ unit sales that such a service requires. So we will put more effort into business wireless broadband as it is an integral part of the overall business 'push' and will get easier if we continue to grow the business data service numbers as we are achieving at the moment.
Our problem is with residential wireless broadband and the pricing from the carriers I mentioned before. We were hoping that MoIP would be a big impetus in increasing our wireless broadband sales (particularly now we have an iPhone MoIP app on the Apple AppStore and that may well prove to be the case over time but it isn't helping us much at the moment. We have talked through the opportunities of offering a 'free' wireless service with new ADSL applications but even the most optimistic estimates cannot make a profit out of such an offer - at least not at our buy prices. So it needs yet more thought and some sort of inspiration which I appear to be very short of at the moment.
The problems of finding effective strategies for wireless broadband seem almost trivial compared to finding even one effective strategy for ADSL - at least for me. We did realise last year that the ways we had offered ADSL for the first six years of our existence had to change but we have struggled to find new approaches that will produce the sort of results we need to achieve over the next 6 - 9 months. It will take some real inspiration and a lot of application to find sensible ways forward from here and, so far, those ways , or even one way, have completely eluded us. I don't imagine its any easier for any other provider of our sort of size and, perhaps, it isn't any easier for any provider irrespective of their size - Telstra's well publicized problems illustrate one aspect of how long held pricing/plan policies finally run out of puff. So - a lot of work to be done in a very short time.
One area where all our plans and 'strategies' don't seem to need any changes (and I realise that's a foolish statement just begging for severe punishment) is our business data services which after a record April are booming in the first two weeks of May with record weekly orders in both weeks and ever growing well qualified prospect lists. We continue to slowly add new sales people (we now have 14 with the first 12 graduating from their trainee period well within the planed time) and will keep adding sales people as fast as we can find 'recruits' that meet our very demanding selection criteria. This is one constraint I hadn't anticipated but it is a reality and one we need to address before it becomes a serious hindrance.
So I didn't make any progress yesterday and will give myself a rest from those activities today and start again tomorrow.
PS: Latest 'independent view of the 'NBN2':
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/digging-deep-for-broadband-answers-20100515-v5jj.html
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46