John Linton Despite the latest poll saying that Labor and Rudd continue to lose 'market share' in polling and if it continued that way there would be a change of government - we signed the NBNCo contract yesterday on the basis of whatever happens in the upcoming election the Tasmanian fibre roll out will continue and that it will provide an alternative to ADSL1 which is all that Exetel can provide for Tasmanian users at the moment (neither Optus nor AAPT have wholesale ADSL2 in Tasmania).
Before we signed the contract we had a smile at this:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/just-16pc-tipped-to-take-up-nbn/story-e6frg6n6-1225876225571
with the usual sub editor's 'head line' and the usual mis-representation of the 'facts' by the journalist. It's a good question as to how many people will select fibre over ADSL2, wireless or even ADSL1 and I certainly don't know the answer. What I do know is that in 4 weeks we have received more applications for fibre services based on Telstra's fibre roll out in Point Cook than we have ADSL customers acquired over 4 plus years. Now, not being the complete fool some people assume I am, I understand that a one off pilot against slow moving opposition is not indicative of anything other than a general trend. This general trend is pretty hard to misread though - whether it's novelty, early to market advantage or the peculiarities of the particular area there is a lot more than 'idle interest' in a fibre service by Point Cook residents.....even at prices based on Telstra costs to wholesale customers.
We will 'go live' with the Opticomm fibre services in their NSW and Victorian 'estates' later this week and we are well behind other ISPs offering fibre services in those locations. So we will have no advantage of 'early to market' in those areas and obviously the 'novelty interest' will have been well and truly gone by now so we will get a much better idea of the sort of take up that may be possible in a more competitive market place. However, like Point Cook, I am assuming that the wholesale buy price for Exetel is similar to the wholesale buy price offered to other customers and therefore, for the first time, Exetel is not at an immediate cogs disadvantage. That may well be naive of me but we were assured that was the case and, naturally, I always believe what suppliers tell me. Anyway - time will tell and it will be an interesting exercise.
After wasting so many years trying to make peak/off peak a benefit to our customers and, no matter what we did, failing to make 100% of our customers 'happy' all of the fibre plans are based on the pay for what you use basis.....in theory....no customer can ever be unhappy....though we will now 'waste' the opportunity of giving sensible users the benefit of the lightly used hours of the day and therefore waste the money that pays for having 'idle' bandwidth. However, if we couldn't get it right after six and a half years of trying there is no reason to expect it can be got right (by us) with the far less well (less overall bandwidth for the links to and from the customer) provisioned fibre circuits.
Irrespective of what happens over the coming months there is one thing that is absolutely certain and directly contradicts the head line in the Australian article - the take up of fibre will far exceed 16% of the market available to it....if the early results of the Point cook trial are in any way indicative the MINIMUM take up of fibre will be 50% within a few months of fibre becoming an option and it will move to something greater than that over time. What any 'final' percentage will be is dependent on how wireless broadband develops and how the 'real' price of installation changes once the various trials are completed...and, of course, what Telstra decides to do in terms of selling whatever to the NBNCo and therefore what its own future fibre offerings will be.
As always, there are more unknowns than knowns.
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