Friday, July 16. 2010LTE Trials By Optus In Sydney......John Linton .....getting nearer what is already being delivered to 'live' customers in the EU. I read this earlier this morning: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/353318/optus_scores_50mbps_sydney_lte_tests/?fp=4&fpid=5 and, as the article references, Telstra have already achieved higher sustainable speeds in their earlier trial in Victoria. Customers in two Scandinavian cities are already using 'live' LTE and that technology is expected to grow rapidly in use before the end of this year in the EU with some mobile providers electing to deploy 'fully compliant' 4G in their roll out of much higher speed wireless broadband. The same scenario is happening in the US with both Verizon and AT&T saying they will provide higher speeds via LTE/4G before the end of this calendar year. Does this mean anything to Australian broadband users? Not really at this moment because these are only trials and the carriers concerned will need big capital budgets and a certain set of future projections on cost versus uptake before they commit to making LTE/4G speeds generally available in sensible chunks of Australia - but they are both giving solid indications that they will be going down the same paths as the Europeans and the Americans - which can only be good for Australians generally and those Australians that cannot get a decent broadband service and are unlikely to have a fibre alternative in the forseeable future. It also raises the issue I (and I'm sure others) raised before the last election when the late and unlamented Rudd produced one of his 32 ridiculous (all subsequently 'broken') 'promises' of delivering a 12 mbps 'national' broadband wire line network for less than his back of a bus ticket calculated $A5 billion together with his then best buddy - Telstra (he simply 'forgot' to ask Telstra if they would go along with his stupidity). At the time I made the, what I thought was the eminently sensible, point that if $A5 billion was available to build a 'national' wire line network why not use it as 'loan capital' to speed up the deployment of LTE by the three mobile carriers in regional areas of Australia? Obviously anything that could have those words applied to it was not going to find favour with the lightweight megalomaniac that the Australian electorate subsequently inflicted upon themselves. But, despite the various manipulations and massive increased estimate since those halcyon days almost three years ago this morning's article simply serves to underline what was always obvious - long before the first customers are connected to Rudd's Folly (at enormous expense to the taxpayer) faster speed at lower cost broadband will be provided by the commercial carriers who, being in competition with each other, will ensure at least a duopoly which should be better that a government monopoly in providing fast broadband services in regional and country Australia.....with no cost to the taxpayer. As things currently stand Australians will have a choice between a government monopoly (think Telecom Australia and the prices it used to charge) offering wholesale fibre connectivity and two, possibly three, commercial wireless networks offering similar or better speeds at less cost and with no installation costs for the service and no 'monthly access' charges to repay a huge debt. There are a great many other factors than the simplified scenario described in a few words above but the reality is that both Telstra and Optus future is dependent on them replacing the lost wire line telephone and broadband revenues (and profits) with a wireless based technology and, unless I have completely misunderstood the realities, they have enormous financial incentives to do exactly that...which means... .......that the two companies who, between them, control over 75% of all services provided to residential end users and who control the wireless networks around Australia will now see exactly how they transfer the vast majority of their current wire line telephone and data residential customers to a wireless alternative network that they own and depend upon for their future.It's something that is uppermost in my mind as we re-consider just what can be done (by Exetel) in re-framing our wireless broadband offerings later today and over the weekend. Does anyone with five minutes of experience in the Australian communications industry see it any other way? Am I the only business/residential communications user in the country who long ago gave up using a wire line telephone or data service? Does anyone really think that Optus and Telstra have any interest in putting customers on a fibre network owned by someone else rather than a wireless network owned by themselves? Is Father Christmas early this year and have the fairies at the bottom of the garden increased in numbers and visibility? Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Thursday, July 15. 201015 Days In To The New Financial Year.......John Linton ........so far - so good. It was really good to go return to work at the North Sydney office yesterday after a three week break - I had forgotten what a very nice group of people comprise Exetel and how their smiling and enthusiastic faces and attitudes are such a very positive ambiance to be around in a working day. It was also really good to see that, via a quick 'get me up to date' review with various managers that a great deal of progress had been made while I had been away and that the new financial year has got off to a really positive start. Maybe my day to day presence isn't required by Exetel any more and I can take more holidays in the future? We have a few things to do concerning the ADSL services we offer as the current desperation by so many ADSL providers becomes more and more evident and there is nothing like an absence from a 'project' to give you a much clearer perspective about all sorts of things. So we went through the analysis of the 8192/384 plans offered to the residential marketplaces in detail and (on the assumption that the Telstra 'plan' to correct the issues with their exchanges has been completed) have re-instated the 'old' 8mbps plans with some enhancements to, hopefully, provide the best offerings available in that category. We will do the same with the 1.5 mbps ADSL1 plans this morning/later today and hopefully be able to achieve the same results. We have, over the past year or so, often been asked to provide Telstra ADSL2 services because of the much greater coverage and have, from time to time, enquired about doing this with Telstra - but always receiving the same response - that they are not prepared to do this unless we did it exclusively which is completely out of the question for Exetel. Apart from Telstra's much higher price for ADSL2 than the prices we pay to either Optus or AAPT we obviously have supply contract terms with both those companies that even if we were prepared to sever relationships with suppliers who have been, over the past 6 plus years, much 'kinder' to Exetel than Telstra ever have (by the proverbial country mile) our current contracts would not allow that to happen. I suppose it was looking at the 8 mbps pricing again that jogged us into re-considering Telstra ADSL2 because the cost, to Exetel, of Telstra ADSL2 is not much more expensive than the cost of ADSL1/8mbps though I haven't seen any up to date pricing so I may be wrong in that assumption. We will find out what the current situation is over the next few days and make a decision once the facts are known but Telstra's attitudes would need to have changed from those of the past to make any progress on this issue possible. I am not holding my breath. There will not be time to look at the ADSL2 plans until next week as we will use the balance of the time available this week to 're-jig' the wireless broadband offerings. We now have more substantial data to look at and it will be an interesting re-examination as we haven't looked at what is actually being used by our own customers for almost four months and a lot changes in that time. It's also time to re-examine just what can be done in terms of add on hard ware and services - again something that we haven't looked at for far too long. So...it seems I have been away for too long in one sense.....so much to look at after a three week absence....but then things are 'travelling' very well so perhaps nothing should be changed in the immediate future? Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Wednesday, July 14. 2010Back To The Same Old Problems........John Linton .....with an even more 'competitive' set of marketplaces. I managed to catch up on reading the Australian communications media yesterday as jet lag made it difficult to do much else other than drift in and out of sleep for most of the day. It doesn't seem that I missed much while I was away (except perhaps the fact that the rest of Australia caught up with the fact that Kevin Rudd was the biggest mistake of an Australian prime minister ever made who did more damage than Whitlam in a shorter time and I was only disappointed that my prediction that he would be a 'one term aberration' was brought about by Sussex Street rather than an election). I guess it just shows that the Australian electorate remain very slow learners with no ability to understand basic facts about people and political parties. I also began to look at what changes had occurred in the various markets in which Exetel offers residential ADSL1 and ADSL2 services and it from what my fogged mind could understand it appears that times have become even more 'competitive' over the past three weeks. The (would desperation be too strong a word?) evident in so many changes by so many suppliers appears to have reached a new level with Telstra BigPond leading the way with even more 'incredible' telephone and door knocking 'special offers' than I can remember ever being the case. It seems that Telstra has become the new TPG with an almost ubiquitous 'presence' in making offers of exceptional 'value' to "every" home user around the country and, unlike TPG, at apparent price points that are not only below a company like Exetel's cost but on terms that appear excellent until you get to the fine print. So I did some calculations on what we may be able to do now that we have dealt with one of the main issues that was preventing us moving forward on ADSL pricing and plans generally but even allowing for the problems of jet lag making thought processes difficult to sustain I could see no clear way forward. I made some progress on 'resuscitating' the 8 mbps offers but the problem remains with that service that even at a reduced cost from Telstra it is still more than double the price of an ADSL2 circuit from Optus or AAPT which renders it useless for any exchange where ADSL2 is available and a poor second choice for the exchanges where Telstra has deployed ADSL2. The same situation appeared to be the case when I looked at the changes that had happened in the wireless broadband marketplaces - the $A40.00 per month price point being 'attacked' with more down loads than before I went away and with no reason for such a move that I could determine. I was glad to see that one of our first corporate HSPA customers had got approval from their head office to provide Exetel with a testimonial: http://www.exetel.com.au/corporate-hspa-testimonials.php and that our progress in providing wireless broadband services to corporate users had increased over the past month with more corporate customers finding the advantages of Exetel's static IPs and back end control and management tools of more use than having to buy 'one off' sims from the carrier's retail outlets. So, after the inevitable sleep late problem of the first morning in a different time zone I will eventually find my way to the office and do some work again for the first time in three weeks - not a pleasant thought. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Tuesday, July 13. 2010Back To Reality.......John Linton ....and nothing brings you back to reality faster than experiencing the total shambles that masquerades as Sydney's International Airport....which must be the only airport in the world that can leave a 777 with 400 passengers sitting on the outer rim of the airport for 45 minutes while it tries to find an 'available gate'......I suppose they forgot that this flight lands at the same time 7 days a week 52 weeks of the year....and weren't reminded as they gave the various instructions for it to land over the preceding hour. It's been a great three weeks of amazing sights, tastes and - most of all - sharing those experiences with another person so completely. Annette and I played the "what are the ten most memorable aspects of the trip" over dinner on the plane home and we pretty much agreed on the majority of them. Faced with the dismissiveness of the Australian customs officials I couldn't help seeing the complete contrasts between the ways Australians go about their jobs and the ever smiling and polite Thais and Sri Lankans in similar positions we had recently experienced - we are not a 'happy' people in so many aspects of our lives and we have so much more than most people in the world. Australia seems to be a place of few smiles. Anyway we are now home, unpacked and revived and about to re-acquaint ourselves with the day to day operations of a communications company again. One pleasant piece of news was that one of our corporate sales reps signed up a new corporate customer for almost 150 ADSL accounts for their employees which, together with the other residential ADSL sales yesterday, set a record for the most ADSL sales in one day ever made by Exetel. In itself not mind boggling but it's always nice to set new records if you are in a difficult marketplace. I will start looking at the ADSL plans later today to determine what, if any, possibilities there are for improving the current plans and re-introducing the ADSL1 8mbps/384kbps plans now that Telstra is meant to have removed the 'bottlenecks' that were causing 8 mbps users so much anger up to the time we stopped selling them. We will also see what opportunities there are to sell the Telstra ADSL2 services which we have attempted to do in the past only to run in to so many 'conditions' that were impossible for us to meet that we gave up even trying to reach an agreement. Perhaps we will have more luck this time around. It's also long past time to make more serious attempts at building our wireless business volumes. I've been looking at the 'movements' in the Australian marketplaces while I've been away as well as trying to get some ideas of where the EU and US carriers are going so that we can make some better informed decisions than we have been able to do in the past. There is little doubt that the growth in wireless broadband is continuing at a rapid pace both via mobile telephony handsets and via chip sets built in to laptops and notebooks and the next ABS figures will be very, very interesting. Having only used wifi and wireless broadband for the past three weeks in three different countries it continues to remain blatantly obvious to me that there are no speed/reliability/usability problems in wireless broadband for business users and for a growing percentage of residential users. How this works out in Australia over the coming twelve months is a fairly important piece of risk taking for more than a few broadband providers in Australia. So it will be a busy day and I guess by tomorrow the last three weeks will be a rapidly fading memory. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Monday, July 12. 2010Last Night Of IrresponsibilityJohn Linton We had a pleasant day doing virtually nothing in Bangkok today having got up at close to 11 am and from then on the day disappeared. After five plus of years of looking I finally found the dragon figurine I have been looking for in five different countries for my youngest son and we bought some sapphires that may become due as achievement prizes for our Australian corporate sales team, Apart from those purchasing successes, a facial for Annette and another amazing dinner the last full day of our break has disappeared with only the flight home tonight to 'look forward to'. I thought a little more about the problems of a small company growing just beyond the limits of the available management resources available to it and what the options become in such a situation. I managed to get past this situation once, a long time ago, but the way(s) employed then proved, some years later, to be totally disastrous. Undoubtedly there were other contributing factors then but the main thrust of the problem was identical. If I remember it correctly it remains impossible to retain the single minded drive that is the base raison d'etre of any start up company when you appoint 'professional managers' - the simple fact is that 'bought in' managers have their own individual agenda for their own lives that are far, far different from the agenda and ruthless self discipline of the founder/managers of start up companies. That was true 20 years ago which was the last/first time I tried to manage such a transition and it seems, at least in part, to pose a similar problem today. Non-start up management simply don't regard "the company" in any semblance of the way the founder managers do - nor do they even attempt to work out why the 'positions' they inherit do not simply conform to their own personal agenda. I have no idea how to deal with this situation but I understand that it is the key problem that confronts Exetel today - and for the next 12 to 18 months. Our problem is that we have a lot of very bright young people who do not have the slightest idea of how to supervise, let alone manage, other young, very bright people. The review days in Sri Lanka made this issue abundantly clear but it is an identical situation in Australia. So as I write these words I am not looking forward to returning to my full time job in Australia. I understand that the decisions we take over the next 2 - 3 months will determine not only whether or not Exetel succeeds in the immediate future but whether it survives in a sensible shape to benefit from the previous 6 plus years of quite successful development. I am always an optimist in such situations but I have serious reservations about how to deal with the management challenges that now confront us. How do you devolve the management of a 100 person company involved in a set of cut throat markets about to face serious technological change? Advertise for suitable management personnel? Employ 'management consultants' to advise you? Seek advice on selling the company to a bigger company that has already So - pity the holiday is about to end. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
Sunday, July 11. 2010Back In Bangkok....John Linton ...for a brief stop over before returning to Australia in two days time. It is not 'fun' to get 2 am in the morning short flights (three and a quarter hours) with time difference that means you land at 7 am in the morning and arrive at your hotel at 8.30 am with every expectation that you will be greeted by the apologetic "I'm sorry sir but your room will not be ready until 2.00 pm". However the smiling people at the Mandarin said that "of course we have made your room available" and promptly delivered us and a complimentary bottle of (real) Louis Roederer champagne to the room which, after a quick shower we opened and demolished and retired to bed, mildly sloshed, to recover from being up for 24 hours only waking up at 3 pm. Of all the hotels in the world of which I have knowledge and that are within my financial means to stay at once a year or so - the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok is not only at the top of the list, it's daylight to second place. Today also happened to be our wedding anniversary and we had a celebration dinner in what I think (including Bentley's, Wilton's and Darwin's wharf ) is the best fish restaurant in the world (that I have experienced). The hotel must appreciate our ongoing patronage because, as we lingered over the last drops of a particularly nice white wine at our window table over looking the river at 'Lord Jim's', they arranged a short, but beautifully spectacular fireworks display from the terrace below us - which seemed to be equally appreciated by the large wedding party assembled there for their own less august celebrations of their own event. So after a walk round the grounds of the hotel and an hour or so at the hotel's exquisite Bamboo Bar listening to a more than acceptable jazz quartet with an adequate singer we ended a particularly nice day. Anette to watch some tennis while I write this blog entry. As the proximity of our return to Australia is now less than 48 hours away our thoughts and conversations have returned to a much higher percentage of Exetel related issues - particularly the problems we discovered in Sri Lanka but more and more the issues confronting Exetel in Australia. In some ways the issues are linked - at least that is what occurs to me. Exetel is still a small company (in any sense of that word) with the slim, largely inexperienced and stretched management structure that is an inevitable part of being a small company. Yet we now have around 100 personnel almost evenly divided between two different countries and with over 120,000 customers using ten different 'products/services' generating over $A5 million a month in revenues that are under 'attack' in all sorts of ways by all sorts of different 'influences'. In my opinion, Exetel is still not big enough to have 'a proper management structure' but is probably now too big not to have such a thing - a problem faced by every company that grows 'organically' and recruits mainly from university graduates....more along US start up lines than those commonly found in Australia. So among our reminiscing of the good times and significant events we have experienced over the past 32 years there was a fairly heavy interspersion of 'what on Earth are we going to do about.....' topics which quite rightly diminished in frequency as the bottle levels receded. However tomorrow will dawn soon enough and the problems will still be there long after the restaurant staff have cleared away the detritus of our very, very pleasant dinner. So despite the fabulous food, fine wine and ultra impeccable service our high spirits were dented just a little. Let's hope heads are clearer tomorrow and better decisions can then be made. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Saturday, July 10. 2010Time To Go Once Again.........John Linton .........for the tenth time of visiting Colombo - must be some sort of record - roughly once per quarter for the past two and a half years. Having lost a day to the flesh being too weak to allow the mind to face up to its responsibilities the remaining review topics were carried out in shorter time frames than had originally been planned - however we did manage to cover all them in at least some detail though not in the depth they really deserved and almost certainly needed. We eventually completed the end of year/start of year review of the Colombo operation before 6 pm this evening and had dinner with the Sri Lankan GM before getting a ride to the airport for our 2 am departure - ahh the joys of international travel. I am very happy with the overwhelming majority of what I saw and what we discussed over the last few days and I believe that the Sri Lankan company now rivals the Australian company for competence and efficiency in almost every aspect of commercial life. There are some things that need much more attention before they fall in to that category but overall - it is a very well run and executed operation that would be better than most Australian commercial organisations.....at least in my limited experience. There remain many unknowns about the future operations and we have yet to face the test of losing key and valuable personnel as our original strategy for avoiding that costly and debilitating scenario has proven very successful in its first first two years and probably will continue to protect us for a good part of our third year - only time will tell. We will continue to, more slowly, expand the number of personnel we employ in Sri Lanka as our business in Australia continues to grow but we will now begin the efforts required to legally begin to provide services within Sri Lanka itself which is a whole new, unknown, process that will involve a great deal of intricate and laborious work in changing the status of the company and the unbelievably difficult task of acquiring a SL carrier licence. I spent some time outlining what we should aim at doing to our SL GM (and to Annette whom I had not previously confided in) and we will now have to consider how we can make this happen. The challenges will be significant but 'faint heart never won fair lady' as my maternal grandmother assured me a long time ago. I learned some significant things about how to deal with governments for 'big thinking projects' from an expert at that task back in the days I worked for Fujitsu and I've never forgotten the things I learned over that amazing few years. The most obvious lesson was not only never 'go small' - always paint the biggest, scariest and simply impossible picture possible and then offer a simple way to accomplish it - and always ask for nothing up front but insist on a long term pay back. Sort of like offering the current Federal government an 'NBN2' for free as long as you get to run it for 20 years.....but as that's already been done it has to be something a lot more believable (and actually deliverable). So.....almost everything (except one deeply disturbing thing) is well in Sri Lanka and FY2011 promises to be the best year of the SL company's short life with modest growth in the current activities and new vista's of immense magnitude to dream about and possibly even bring about - perhaps a 'world first' for Exetel?
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Friday, July 9. 2010Everything Looks Much Brighter Now.....John Linton
Apart from very sore ribs the affliction has passed as if was never there so it is a great relief to know that I am not actually going to die at this particular moment in time. I know that male's make a much bigger fuss than females about minor afflictions but that one was pretty nasty - based on my lack of experience with such things. There is now only on day to complete the work that was planned to take two days as we can't move our flights as the few services out of Colombo in the direction we wish to go are fully booked so that's why God created efficiency. Fortunately most of the work that was meant to be a joint effort yesterday has been done by Rohan and I will do my best to explain the other concepts more quickly than I had originally intended to later this morning before going to the airport and catching our flight late tonight. Our major objectives in Sri Lanka over the coming year are as I attempted to explain them yesterday - to finish the process of ensuring that every person in Sri Lanka has more and more detailed knowledge of the queries our residential customers will make than at any previous time in Exetel's 'history'....as well as continuing to meet the requirement of an average answer time of less than one minute for any incoming call. This, in itself, is a tough proposition but it will continue to get tougher as 'old' services continue to be replaced by new services requiring a continuing expansion of the knowledge required and it will now be done without one of the two 'on loan' Australian 'knowledge transferers' with the other one due to return to Australia at the end of this calendar year. So the second key objective is to replace Martin's dedication to the creation of new sections (and ongoing revision of the old sections) of the exewiki with Colombo personnel and to acquire the new knowledge required for new services by sending people from Sri Lanka to Australia rather than the previous methods of sending Australian personnel to Sri Lanka. That in itself will be a major challenge. However it will be interesting to be part of making it work. Our other key challenge for the Sri Lankan operation over the coming 12 months is to develop additional sources of revenue so that the company is not reliant on Exetel for its continued financial existence. We have a number of ways to do this which include the most obvious one of expanding our contract programming business which we will now begin to do. Our own knowledge of complex data base systems and the process of developing them nd maintaining them over the past six plus years is far greater than the average likely 'target' company we will provide services to and that knowledge plus the much lower hourly cost for coding and supervision should make that objective more than possible....and in itself could easily cover all costs associated with operating the Sri Lankan company. The other opportunity is to provide back office support services to other companies that match the experience that has been built up in providing similar services to Exetel Australia. We have had several enquiries about doing that but we have not pursued the because, in my opinion, we weren't ready to do that at the times we received the interest. I think that the reservations I had have, almost, completely disappeared now and that we could consider providing such services in the future. Whether we could sensibly offer such services to Australian companies remains a doubt but we could certainly offer them to NZ and UK companies. So it will be an interesting day. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Thursday, July 8. 2010A Strange Thing Happened To Me Yesterday......John Linton ......I got sick, truly devastatingly sick, from food poisoning last night. Having been blessed with a boarding school education (and therefore the food that accompanied it) for 12 years of my life during the 1950s and 1960s I have always been able to eat anything put in front of me without suffering any consequences irrespective of what nauseous mess the plate contained - and so it has been throughout my life from then on and on 9 previous visits to Sri Lanka I have eaten without a care in the world where everyone else I have met has regaled me with some horrific food derived sickness experiences they have endured. I won't revolt you with any details but it is an agonisingly painful experience not only hurting to a point where you don't think that you can bear the pain but it turns your brain to mush and delivers a headache of cataclysmic proportions. Enough of self pity but I have only just been able to get out of bed and am making some attempt at pulling myself together - for someone who has barely been unwell throughout their life it is a chastening experience. We made a start on addressing some of the key issues relating to the Sri Lankan operation yesterday afternoon and sketched out the key areas that need to be looked at and actions put in to place improve every aspect of the operation in Colombo. As with all service organisations the issues almost all revolve around personnel and particularly their retention, knowledge acquisition and reward. One of the key aspects of knowledge acquisition has been addressed by the efforts of one of the Australian 'trainers' who has been working on the creation of a knowledge base for the training of new SL personnel and also for easy reference by Exetel customers. We have been building this almost since 'day one' of our existence but Martin has taken it way beyond what he 'inherited' when he was given the responsibility for delivering a truly workable system - the current results can be seen on the Exetel web site here: http://exewiki.exetel.com.au/index.php?title=Main_Page As it stands at the moment it contains over 1,000 commonly asked questions and their complete, and detailed, answers. One of the objectives is to increase the number from 1,000 to 2,000 plus over the coming year. In terms of knowledge acquisition each staff member is asked to do an 'exam' each month based on 60 questions selected by a random number generator from the 1,000 plus topics.The score they achieve over each month of the past year determines one aspect of the remuneration increase but also pinpoints areas of their knowledge that require improving by both the staff member and their supervisor. All staff members are encouraged to add questions and topics to the wiki and from now on all Exetel's customers that wish to do so are also asked to submit suitable topics. As I mentioned yesterday we have endowed a professorship at SLIT to work on state of the art Artificial Intelligence system which, in part, will be trialled on the ExeWiki to make it even easier for customers to find the answers to almost every question they wish to ask. That is one of the key aspects of the Sri Lankan operation that needs to have a lot more work done on it to fully integrate it with both the company's operating objectives as well as completely integrating it with our GURUs personnel data base performance management system. We have made a lot of progress over the past year and it is looking good for the coming twelve months. PS: My youngest son sent me the following article earlier this morning.I wonder what difference this innovation by WOW will make to on line 'behaviour': Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Wednesday, July 7. 2010So It's Goodbye To Old England.....John Linton ....if not forever then for at least a while. We have had a wonderful two weeks. We had a late and leisurely breakfast and had little time after that to do anything but pack and wait 20 minutes for our transport to Heathrow for our first flight on a 380 ( Emirates) for the long trek to Colombo via Dubai. I have to say that whatever my expectations of the luxury provided by the 380 may have been they were far exceeded by the actuality. The seven hour flight flashed by helped by watching two movies on a large screen and a delightful meal. So we are at Dubai airport waiting 2 hours to get our connecting flight to Colombo in one of (not the) Emirates lounges which appears to be as big as the pitch of the SCG but with fountains, lakes and huge, and comfortable chairs and settees as well as several well stocked bars and two complimentary restaurants) - not appealing at 1 am in the morning and for people who only ate a few hours ago. We are getting back to 'work mode' with Annette preparing to do the half year reviews for all Sri Lankan staff (nearly 50 of them now) and me thinking about the end of year financial and operational review and the plans for the coming financial year and the major improvements we need to plan for for each of the coming quarters. Personally, I am very happy with what Exetel has accomplished in Colombo since our first tentative 'entry' in February 2007 when we ran an ad and 'interviewed' prospective help desk engineers by telephone and hiring two on a work from your home basis. Since we made the the decision to open a full support/provisioning/sales office some two and a half years ago and especially since we actually moved in to our own rented premises in June of 2008 we have managed to make great strides in providing a level of support excellence that we believed would be possible......to exceed the response times and speed of resolution of problems provided by any other Australian communications company. It has taken us the best part of two years to achieve the first of three objectives - to answer support, provisioning and sales telephone calls in an average of less than 60 seconds - consistently - month on month. I don't know of any other Australian communications company that goes anywhere near that achievement. Over the next few days we will finalise the plans to allow us to achieve our second objective - rectifying any customer problem in the shortest possible times - acknowledging the variable time frames imposed by the different carriers we use and the different fault categories involved. In fact the problems we have faced have been how to define and categorise the various scenarios that 'faults' fall into including the issues where there are no faults for us to address - simply set up and usage problems by the customer. However we have several sensible ideas on how we can address these issues and automate the measurement of the actual responses so we can track whether we will be achieving whatever targets we set. The third target is to have the most knowledgeable support, provisioning and sales personnel in the areas of residential ADSL, Fibre, Wireless Broadband and Mobile services of any communications company in Australia providing those services. We started this process when these functions were based in Australia but we have gone far beyond the simple processes we had in place then. We have a very long way to go but we are continuing to look for ways of improving a problem/question/training knowledge base that combines the best aspects of a wiki based infobase and have endowed a professorship at SLIT to develop the absolute state of the art artificial intelligence interface to that knowledge base. We will further 'refine' our plans for the achievement of this third target before we leave to return to Australia. So - it's going to be a busy few days so hopefully we will be able to sleep on the next leg of the trip. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Tuesday, July 6. 201060 gb Of ADSL2 Plus 'Unlimited' Phone Calls Plus No Line Rental....John Linton .......for $A28.00 a month....and no activation charge. We visited a second hand book shop opened a year or so ago by my favourite quarterly literary review (Slightly Foxed) in the Gloucester Road a minute or so from the tube station before going our separate ways on our last day in the UK. We got the tube with Annette getting off at Knightsbridge to go shopping for a dress to wear at James's wedding and I continued on to Piccadilly to have a haircut and visit some of the most enticing shops (for me) in the world. I ended up buying two pairs of shoes at Crockett & Jones for far too much money but of exceptional value. The last time I visited this shop (the outlet for the factory in the North of England) was in my last year of school in the UK to buy shoes so it been almost 50 years between visits. The service and attention to detail was without blemish and the hand made shoes were not much more expensive than Bally's production line offerings which I have worn for several decades. When Annette eventually returned at around 3 pm we had a sandwich lunch in the Hotel's coffee shop before she returned to the shopping 'fray' having failed to find a suitable dress and will return at some unknown time. On our tube trips I had written down some of the ads for broadband and telephony and when I got back to the hotel I looked up some of the offers. It's always difficult to work out what is being offered from most ISP web sites but from what I could work out this has to be one of the better 'deals': http://www.plus.net/residential/bundles.shtml Pretty impressive value for 95% plus of ADSL2 users I would have thought and much, much lower cost than anything offered in Australia. If you could be bothered, which as it is no direct interest why would you, you would find many similar bundling deals available to UK users and, if my elementary German and French is not deceiving me the same sorts of deals are being offered across the EU. So it seems that there is very little money now being made from ADSL and wire line calls/line rental in the cut throat communications markets that exist here. One of the reasons I do some elementary 'analysis' work while I visit here is to get some idea of how the Australian marketplaces will develop and, at least to date, pricing and 'presentation' of residential communications services here have pretty much predicted what will happen in Australia with a 'lag' of 15 - 18 months. While such speculation isn't particularly useful 'in detail' it does provide a basis for looking at the general direction of current happenings and some sort of time line for changes in direction and pricing. One thing that has been tracking for four years has been the year on year reduction of the cost of residential data and telephone services. While it's true that costs have fallen sharply year on year it seems, at least to me, that prices have fallen just as sharply - perhaps even more sharply. Not being a carrier this doesn't really affect Exetel but I do wonder how the carriers have dealt with the changes to date and what they are going to do to deal with the steepening declines in "ARPU" in the future? The larger companies have disproportionately high over heads even in their most efficient departments that cannot be sustained if "ARPU" actually does decline to the sorts of levels that UK pricing seems to indicate. The Rudd/Gillard recklessness in trying to change Australian communications via 'NBN2' is only now being recognised for what it is - action without knowledge or thought. Perhaps the largest danger of this recklessness is the fact that current infrastructures are being casually destroyed with no thought of whether the 'replacement' actually is a replacement - let alone an enhancement. While I understand that wasting tax payer's money by spending it on anything is actually fiscally neutral you have to think that Australia, and its citizens, would be better off with $A30 billion of more hospitals and medical university places than the recreation of Telecom Australia. But then I am not an economist nor a Treasury mandarin. What is going to happen to the Australian telecommunications industry if revenue per user does continue to fall in conjunction with the infrastructure currently supplying it being destroyed by a separate and unproven infrastructure? Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Monday, July 5. 2010Back To Stay In Central London For A Couple Of Days.......John Linton .....a totally different,and nothing like as pleasant, experience from the beauty and peace of the English rural districts. We returned our hire car and got a cab into our hotel which is situated just behind the Ritz in St James. Very pleasant hotel with impeccable service and we had a light lunch before I escorted Annette to her preferred shopping destination and then walked back to the hotel with the first of her 'parcels'. The weather, incredibly for England, still remains sunny and very warm - but the hotel room has modern air conditioning which is difficult to find here and impossible in the areas we have been visiting. When logging in to the hotel internet I noticed as well as the main wifi connection they had an option for a prioritised VoIP connection - never seen that before. We will go to our favorite London restaurant tonight and then Annette will do a shop till you drop day in Oxford Street tomorrow finishing up with theatre (All My Sons - David Suchet and a similar English cast) and dinner tomorrow night. An interesting aspect of central London is that (having bought a new much faster modem out of curiosity) wireless broadband runs at almost 20 mbps on occasions and I'm told the networks will be delivering consistently above 20 mbps before Christmas. As I have no longer got any close contacts in the industry here I can't get the details of the infrastructures and versions now in use in the various areas/districts of the UK. Perhaps its just testing LTE on a wider scale than is planned for Australia by Telstra and Optus. Whatever it is - it's impressive. While I have never been inconvenienced by the wireless broadband speeds I have used in Australia or in the UK I understand that some percentage of a broadband user base finds fast download speeds important and simply buy a service on that criterion. I wonder what those user types will do if wireless becomes this fast in Australia? Complain about the latency? Our hotel has a fibre connection (I suppose being in central London is like being in the CBD in Sydney or the CBD in Tokyo - you can get 100 mbps fibre links for very little cost) and I timed the hotel's link against the wireless broadband link - wireless was faster by about 5 mbps. While that doesn't mean anything , it's an example of what happens when multiple users log in to any service that has a fixed bandwidth - each user takes their share of a finite resource whether it's a direct fibre link to a building or a mobile carrier's tower servicing a geographic area. Either infrastructure will more than adequately serve whatever purposes are required by the overwhelming majority of end users. Food for thought. As my mind clears as the last of the gentle holiday days go past I have begun to think about how to deal with the change from ADSL to either fibre or wireless for the majority of residential users over the next 18 months. I have no idea of time frames or directions as the only real information is from our own data analysis (ie. what we can see in the adds/moves/deletes of our own customers) and what is publicly available in the US and EU media - the Australian media is not helpful in this respect as it seems to confine itself to today's 'sensation' rather than doing any sensible investigation of true future directions - which may well be because Australian companies are strangely reticent to talk honestly about their operations. Having said that, I think that it will be difficult to predict the 'end of ADSL' for a while but you'd have to think that there is a great deal of work that has to be done to between now and xx/xx/xx to satisfy the economic imperatives of delivering/migrating residential data services via a new main medium/media? My view is that we will have to put that in place quite soon now.One of the things we have already started is supplying (for those who want it) a no monthly charge wireless connection with any new or re-contracted ADSL plan. While this is in its very early days I think it is something that's going to be quite important once/if Australian wireless broadband exceeds the speed of wire line broadband. We will need to keep improving that offer (both to new customers and to current customers) over the coming months with the ultimate aim of providing both services at the same per gb pricing - when/if ever that becomes possible. It seems from what I have seen in the UK that that convergence is much closer now than it was a year ago - at least for the majority of current broadband users (sub 20 gb per month) and it is likely that the Australian carriers will follow the EU and US carriers in the not that distant future. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Sunday, July 4. 2010Then You Return To London....John Linton ...and it puts everything in perspective. We had a leisurely breakfast and got a taxi to the closest main line train station (Egham - one of thousands) and for the equivalent of $A17.00 per person got a return ticket to central London with unlimited use of the London underground. The train was on time to the second and the train arrived at Waterloo within seconds of the nominated time - actually early. We moved from the main line station to the underground via a series of escalators and passageway and got to Piccadilly Circus within an hour of leaving our hotel. We had a simple agenda which we accomplished over the next two hours buying various presents for various family members.I bought a pair of Bally shoes at less than 50% of the Sydney price and Annette said the Ferragamo shop (in the priciest area of London) where she briefly looked for a new dress for the upcoming wedding was one third of Sydney's prices for identical items. As we wandered back from our shopping excursions in Old Bond Street and the Burlington Arcade down Piccadilly 'by chance' we passed the entry to Swallow Street so, it being a very hot day in England and after two hours plus walking around we were drawn to Bentley's where we were able to get a table and had a cooling drink followed by one of their impeccably selected, presented and served fish meals for which they have been renowned for almost 100 years of three different types of oysters and Lobster a la Russe accompanied by a white wine of total beauty (with a perfectly poured and 'young' Guinness to quench the initial thirst). When we left some 90 minutes later we decided to investigate the closure of the streets around Piccadilly and Regent Street and discovered the UK version of the Sydney Mardi Gras. It seemed more of a 'political' protest than what the Sydney 'event' has become and pretty boring to be a spectator at. So we made our way back to our hotel having spent a whole day doing very little. in Sydney and at very low cost. The shopping was at half Sydney prices and the meal at Bentley's was the best possible quality produce, delightfully served at half Doyle's prices with a fine white Burgundy (of an excellent year) at one fifth the price you would pay in Sydney. I don't like London, but value for money and incredibly easy travel to every nook and corner it's almost unbeatable. In summary the travel was of a standard, comfort, speed and precision we can only dream about and the quality and prices of everything else just make Sydney a total rip off. And an ad in the train for Tesco (a National chain of grocery stores) offered a mobile plan of unlimited mobile calls, unlimited SMS and unlimited browsing for 30 pounds ($A50.00). Which makes you think how any Australian carrier would fare against that sort of plan offering from a RESELLER not a carrier. An interesting aberration from the other information I have been slowly accumulating. I'm not sure whether UK prices for wireless broadband mean anything in the context of the Australian markets - almost probably not - but I have found that Australia does 'track' almost everything that happens in the UK with about an 18 month delay. If that is going to continue then we would see wireless broadband with ADSL2 type speeds in Australia with around 20 gb down/up loads for around $A25 - $A30.00 before the end of calendar 2011. If that were to happen, together with whatever happens with fibre over the coming 18 months will make a very interesting scenario for ADSL and the companies that then depend on ADSL revenues for their main revenue sources. My pre-paid wireless service is 10 pounds ($A16.00) for 2 gbytes (I didn't need a modem/dongle as I had the one from last year but if I had wanted one it was 7 pounds extra) but I could have got 5 gbytes for 20 pounds or 10 gbytes for 30 pounds....so even accounting for currency variations the prices of wireless broadband are around 40% less than the cheapest Australian plans - and they worked really well in all but total rurality on this trip. On balance, I think I'd rather not have invested in ADSL2 DSLAMs....but who really knows? Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Saturday, July 3. 2010English Motorways - Feast Or FamineJohn Linton We left the dales behind us this morning and headed for the M1. I am a great admirer of both the topology and surfaces of the English motorway system that can get you from practically any part of the country to any other part of the country at breath taking speeds....until there's a problem. Anyway we had an uneventful few miles from our hotel to the our joining point to the M1 just outside Chesterfield and once on the motorway quickly settled down in the outside lane driving at between 80 mph up to over 90 mph most of the 120 miles to the M25 junction where we ground to a, literal, halt on the slip road to the M25. As is the usual experience on that dreaded piece of road we ambled along at 5 - 10 mph between frequent periods of motionlessness for about 30 minutes (in which time we traveled less than one and a half miles) before resuming our journey at a more sedate 60 - 70 mph all the way to the exit the other side of Heathrow where our hotel for the next two nights was located. The trip took just over 3 hours to travel 156 miles....a pretty reasonable travel time anywhere in the world but to do that required quite a bit of 'white knuckle' driving as the users of English motorways seem to have different distance judgment scale than I do and also assume that you should get out of their way (even when you are doing 90 mph and there is a series of vehicles directly in front of you all doing 95 mph) even if the lane you need to move into is crammed with other vehicles - which it quite often is on the section of the M1 we used. So we were grateful to arrive at our destination in one piece and after checking in having a refreshing ice cold drink on their attractive lawn overlooking their moat. While Annette watched the Wimbledon men's semi finals I scanned the Australian media and looked for inspiration in the US, UK and German comms media. I didn't find any which is probably because I have now been away for 10 days and my mind has lost its focus on Exetel events and issues as was the purpose of the holiday. One thing I did find of some interest was the UK pricing for lower end wireless broadband services in the 3 - 5 gb (down/up) range which covers a very large percentage of broadband users in Australia. Most of the offers I could find were in the 15 to 20 pound range which is 5 to 7 Big Macs in terms of price points or well below $A30.00. I can't estimate an 'average' speed with any meaning but the lowest I have got on this trip is 1.6 mbps (wilds of rurality) and the fastest currently (bearing in mind I have never used the service in a big city or even very close to one) is a little over 13 mbps down and close to 3 mbps up. As I wrote a few weeks ago; the US carriers seem to have decided that 2 gbps for around $US25 is the key market point for mobile data over telephone handsets so it would make sense for a PC type service to have the 3 - 5 gb and at the same price point as 2 gb for a mobile service it is very attractive. What it seems to indicate is that as the volumes of data via wireless networks continues to rapidly grow the price er gb continues to fall....but...apparently faster than estimated if the price movement in the UK between this time last year and today is real. Now that Telstra has to 're-cast' its longer term strategy for residential services (Holland just beat Brazil!!) to find a way of going forward and it would be even more blindingly obvious now that wireless is the way to go as a competitor to fibre. If the prices I am currently seeing in the UK are real then Telstra (and Optus) would be tracking the same cost reduction curve. Neither company has any incentive to continue to invest in ADSL. Neither company has any incentive to invest in fibre. Both companies have significant capital works investment money committed in Australia - I guess it will all/mostly go to wireless infrastructure. If that is the case then the competition between fibre and wireless outside the capital cities will become almost a foregone conclusion - at least in my view of how data communications technologies have evolved and died over the last thirty years. Only time will tell but it remains an interesting business to be in - as it always has. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
Friday, July 2. 2010All Good Things Must Come To An End........John Linton .....or so pessimists seem to say. Our final day in the Dales/Peaks was spent on a scenic drive following a route (with detailed instructions) prepared by a local with a We stopped for lunch in yet another charming village and ate yet more home made pastry and meat combinations washed down with a modest amount of the local 'best. We Today was billing day for Exetel which recorded our first ever slight fall in month on month recurrent billings in our 78 month 'history'. This was because of our decision to stop providing services to out of contract money losing ADSL customers which we have been implementing over the past three months. However the monthly recurrent plus once off billing meant that the amount was in single figure thousands which is, in some ways, quite remarkable and is certainly better than I expected. The major difference was in the 'profitability' for the month which jumped markedly and that is hopefully the start of a trend....well we all should be able to dream every so often. In many ways, I am sorry to lose any customer as is any commercial entity but I have to say that the two immediate benefits (less bandwidth usage and more monthly 'profit') take away much of the regret and make it much easier to provide better services to the overwhelming majority of residential ADSL customers - so hopefully the customers who leave Exetel and the customers who stay will both be happy - as will Exetel. 10 days away from the day to day 'challenges' of daily business life continues to change my perspective (as I'm sure that holidays tend to do for every person who is able to take them). I would like to think that the thoughts that cross the remainder of my mind over the last week or so will remain with me when we head back to Australia in 10 days or so time. It is really nice to look benignly on the world in general and to notice that the hair trigger irritability you have become used to exhibiting is completely absent when confronting the myriad of minor difficulties that tend to invade every day irrespective of how relaxed you are (dangerous drivers, motor way tail backs, pushy people, loud voiced fellow diners etc). Perhaps there is some chance it will remain a normal state of mind? Unlikely but it would be nice. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 |
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