John Linton .....try, try , try again....and then keep repeating the process.
I did some more 'analysis' on wireless broadband yesterday - but it was 'saturday analysis' which means that I browsed various competitors and US carrier web sites while watching Geelong proceed to a routine win over Melbourne. Our efforts to date to find a (profitable) way of providing wireless broadband to residential and business users has, largely, been a failure - we simply cannot begin to match the 'give away' programs of Optus themselves and other Optus associated providers. We are making some encouraging progress in the business sectors and we would now expect to make more progress in those sectors as the facilities we offer to manage wireless broadband 'fleet' continue to develop and MoIP becomes better accepted. There is no doubt that together with finding ways to deal with the saturation (and the subsequent competitor actions caused by saturation) finding ways to more rapidly build a wireless broadband base is either the most important or second most important challenge of the new financial year.
Our simple problem is that our buy price for data is getting close to double the price that Telstra, among others, offer residential customers at retail. Now, while that actually isn't true when you REALLY look at what is being offered it's certainly apparently true to the majority of people who look for wireless broadband service.....so it's the same thing as far as developing a service goes. Interestingly neither Telstra nor Optus attempt to offer the same smoke and mirrors pricing to corporate customers - I wonder why that would be? That doesn't help us in residential sales but it is becoming noticeable in business sales where pricing being offered by Telstra and Optus is actually higher than Exetel's pricing and doesn't have the add ons we provide but, in most cases is tied in to a 'whole of business deal' on 3+ year contracts. Again that will change over time as we get more exposure in the larger corporate market sectors.
In residential offerings we have two issues that have been insurmountable so far: the fixed monthly service charge and the very high per mb cost of data that Optus charge us. Anything is 'overcomeable' if we were to resort to the smoke and mirrors hucksterism of the current major offerors of wireless broadband services - but I really dislike resorting to that sort of 'gut the mug he/she deserves it for being that stupid' type of operating. Then again, I may be entirely the wrong sort of person to be involved in these exercises and I may have to acknowledge that fact and withdraw from future planning processes for wireless broadband.....but for this one last time that will not be possible.
We have a few more days to come up with new ways of approaching the various market sectors we think we may have a chance of addressing but I have to say that I really don't currently have any ideas that could be considered even vaguely appealing. We don't get "free" wireless USB modems and we don't get "free" monthly access charges and we certainly don't get "free" data so it is not possible to match, or even get close to, the current offers from our competitors or the retail operation of our supplier for that matter. We need a bolt from the blue inspiration otherwise we will have to endure another year of mundanity in marketplaces that are rapidly growing. The problem is simple - how to offer something meaningfully attractive where our competitors are selling at half our buy price?
Why is that so hard?
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