John Linton The monthly recurrent billing was completed a few minutes ago and it was a very good result for such a difficult month with all services,except ADSL2, showing strong growth and the increase in ADSL1 revenue almost redressing the slight reduction in ADSL2 revenue, which was a pleasant, surprise bonus. It's always a nice few minutes reviewing the summary figures each month and although, the minutae of the business day soon wash away the 'inner glow' each month's figures produce, it gives a great deal of satisfaction to see the results of all the very hard work that is put in by so many people each month show the results in such 'tangible' terms.
Pleasing though the billing figures were we now face another 30 days of really hard and mind bendingly exhausting work to try and improve the offerings we make across twelve services to 6 different markets and to find better ways of making those improvements more understandable and appealing to so many different types of people. This month should see the 'Christmas Specials' from those companies still able to make them though, for the first time this calendar year, I sensed 'discount exhaustion' beginning to become evident in some ISPs public statements and subsequent pricing moves. Perhaps, after 15 months of give aways 'the barrel is pretty much scraped clean' for some of the more aggressive discounters? Though quite possibly wishful thinking engendered by the 'euphoria' of the bill run.
We have got, perhaps, some more accommodation to receive from at least one of our providers that should provide some impetus to a few of our services but nothing is certain in this business year so I am not taking that possibility into consideration unless it shows up in an executable contract variation. Our main focus in November will be to meet our non ADSL2 growth targets and see what can be done about again slowing the churn away of our ADSL2 customers while 'improving' our free ADSL2+ strategies. Like any other situation there is more than one way to 'skin a cat' and the multi-terabyte/unlimited download path has more than reached its use by date....or maybe I'm completely wrong in reading the various figures.
I have an unusually crowded (non-Christmas function related) diary for the coming week which is quite unusual for me - who abhors 'meetings' of any kind. The meetings that are necessary I have no problems with (bank to determine whether we should rent or buy more floor space in North Sydney, possible new IP providers, possible new hardware providers, possible 'collaborator' in ADSL2 procurement/selling/administering) but there are several others that I will almost certainly find reasons to delegate or cancel (one offer to buy Exetel from a company that doesn't seem capable of buying a good lunch, two companies who want to get into the Australian communications business whose company details via Google seem very odd). We will need to hold more internal meetings than usual as we both try and make November a benchmark month and also try and progress our new calendar year planning.
A busy few days.
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