John Linton ....but no real progress in finding answers to the ADSL issues.
We met with two of our three major suppliers during the week to see what, if anything, could be done about the latest round of 'ADSL offers' from Telstra Retail and some other providers. From these discussions we got the very clear impression that at least the two major wholesales we met with were beginning to be significantly effected by the problems we had told them about for the past eighteen months - but they were still in the cloud cuckoo land (driven by their ' very top management') of having current year business plans driven by net adds for total customer growth. Apparently this 'top management' hadn't been convinced by the ABS or any other market analysis that the ADSL market was saturated and that a combination of Telstra Retails 'welcome back' campaigns and TPG's customer growth at any cost efforts made net customer growth a very difficult proposition.
Maybe I am completely wrong and our wholesale suppliers are achieving their ADSL growth targets from their other customers. It seemed to come as a surprise to both suppliers to be told (I am sure for the dozenth or more time) that Exetel makes absolutely no money at all from selling their ADSL services and that it's only the profits we make from other services that allows us to stay in business - and as I emphasised - that is a deliberate long term policy as a company of Exetel's size can never compete if it didn't do that. I tend to think that they do understand the current situation as they both provided us with very significant 'accommodations' with the promises of additional decreases in the near future.
My suggestion of one year' 'free' port charges on a two year contract wasn't taken seriously but, as I said, if we continue to pay increased back haul charges by adding new customers and they have an increased number of unused ports due to the depredations of Telstra Retail what are they losing by giving us the ports for zero cost at this time when their own figures are telling them that they have a net loss of port users each month? Money from back haul is better than no money at all - and money from the second year of usage is a future bonus. I doubt whether they will take us up on doing that but as I tried to explain to them - Telstra's 'welcome home bonuses' and two year plan pricing goes a long way towards this anyway so why not face reality before it's too late? I would expect to see this idea 'stolen' and used by their retail companies in the not too distant future in some form or other if, in fact, times are as tough for them as they are for us in residential ADSL.
In any event the accommodations we did receive have allowed us to make some positive changes to some of our retail offerings which should have made the users of those plans very happy. It has also allowed us to re-look at the off peak/peak periods again - based on some different accommodations from a more innovative supplier than our current 'stick in the mud' thinking providers. I know we are not a big customer of our main wholesale suppliers but it really does surprise me that they have such a very limited 'imagination'. We will meet with a prospective new IP supplier next week for the 'final time' having been going backwards and forwards with them for over twelve months now. Apart from providing more diverse paths at lower pricing than our current providers we want something we have asked the current providers for (which costs them absolutely nothing) but they simply won't provide it. I'm hoping the prospective new provider will be more sensible/imaginative.
Personally, in residential ADSL terms, I think free is the new unlimited.
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