John Linton .......though the current announcement is a radical turn around.
We are gradually moving towards the completion of the new financial plan for FY2011 with the bulk of the work completed with only the various future service pricing to be completed. This article was interesting to me when I read it earlier this morning as it indicates a major change of direction by at least one of the largest US carriers:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282173014134754.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_INTL_LSMODULE
the key statement being:
"The plan will be replaced by new offerings costing $15 an month for 200
megabytes of data traffic or $25 a month for 2 gigabytes. AT&T says
98% of its customers use less than those amounts. Users who exceed 2
gigabytes of usage will pay $10 a month for each additional gigabyte."
I can't remember when the previous unlimited plans were introduced by the various US carriers but I think it was late 2009/early 2010 - so this is a very different analysis of what the markets need and will continue to buy.
I have made references to the difficulties that Exetel has faced in offering a viable wireless offering that is attractive to either mobile hand set or PC/Laptop users many times over the past two years and I was quite surprised to see AT&T now charging $US25.00 for 2 gb of data and commenting that is more than 98% of their user's current down loads. It will be interesting to see what the other major carriers do now. Co-incidentally - our wireless broadband users follow the same pattern with 99.5% of customers downloading less than 1.5 gb per month and we charge $A22.50 for 2 gb but our price includes uploads as well - so it appears that there is a great deal of similarity between US and Australian usage patterns.
I don't know what to make of the current ADSL market and I have little understanding of how it will continue to move. We do an 'analysis' of our own customer's usage each month and it has been interesting to see how significantly our own usage demographics have changed over the past twelve months let alone over the past six years. Today - Exetel's customer base 'profiles' are very, very different to when we started and even quite different to two years ago. We continue to 'lose' customers who down load large amounts of data and continue to gain customers whose required downloads are very 'modest. Today less than 1% of our ADSL customers download more than 60 gb in 'peak periods' and around 20% of our customers download less than 2 gb per month. It was obviously time for a change in emphasis in what we provide moving forward.
With so many changes in the different marketplaces it is becoming more difficult (if that is possible) to run a company of Exetel's size. We have always manged to 'read' the constant changes relatively well and have seldom been 'caught by surprise' over the years. I do think that Telstra will become more of a 'factor' in the residential marketplace than they have been for the last few years and I think that will introduce a completely different set of problems for all sorts of companies that they may not have factored in to their planning. Assuming Labor gets re-elected later this year I also think the 'NBN2' will confuse things even more than they are today. A lot of unknowns including what actually now happens in the Australian economy - which is not remotely as 'rosy' in outlook as our current government would have us believe from what I am seeing and hearing.
So, FY2011 is shaping up to be a very different year from past years with more uncertainty, doubt and direction change than in any previous year of Exetel's short existence. Whatever FY2011 brings I think that our planning has been very conservative and any final draft will be more conservative than the current iteration.
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