John Linton .....and before you know it - three weeks of November will have passed by the end of today with virtually nothing accomplished over the past almost eleven months. A wasted year in which what ever opportunities that might have existed have been buried under the weight of a set of residential marketplaces in a constant state of upheaval and change.....or so it now seems.......at least to me.
I looked over my diary and saw I had a very busy week with the major planning processes now running behind what is required and too many projects too far from completion for comfort. I personally blame the 'NBN2' which even that most left wing of senior economics writers is now expressing the first real doubts about:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/nbn-plan-has-the-signs-of-a-historic-stuffup-20101121-182ld.html
which is quite a shock coming from someone of his political bias. He, for the first time in anything I have read, points out the real situation with as he puts it - "a characteristically grandiose scheme her swaggering predecessor announced without thought to its daunting implications".
I am not going to re-iterate my views on the perpetrator of the 'NBN2' nonsenses and the inescapable damage already been done to Australia's communications infrastructures - the article adequately supports the views I have been expressing and I cannot be bothered to re-summarise them....I moved on after the last election. I have three meetings this week that I wouldn't be having if there was any form of sanity in federal government in this country or any level of common sense in its electorate....but that falls in to the category of not expecting the sun to rise and set according to the times in the tables. The first two involve 'joint ventures' on two different aspects of residential ADSL2 and the third is to determine how best we can more rapidly increase the take up of VoIP by our residential users. All three of these meetings would have been unthinkable to me at the start of this calendar year but then so much has happened, or more correctly, not happened because of federal government fiat that companies such as Exetel are looking at very, very different futures.
One example of this has been the fact that we developed some software that allows a customer to use VoIP (MoIP) to reduce call costs on their mobile handset and have been offering that service for almost 9 months now. We have had people from all over the world buy that piece of software as well as a steadily increasing take up by our own users and other users in Australia. With the ongoing decline in the number of households using wire line telephony we see a big future for that application in terms of increasing the amount of wireless broadband services we provide. The most important meeting I have this week is with someone who we might be able to work with to sell such a service at 100 times greater volumes than we could begin to think about achieving via a jv. If there had been no talk of an 'NBN2' we would never have committed the resources or looked for non-ADSL2 services as a serious component of our future service offerings.
Maybe that opportunity will fizzle out in the discussions as to who does what and who provides what and, crucially, who gets what from this opportunity - that would not surprise me. However, to me, it illustrates the value of both developing your own software and of building an 'independent platform' to provide services that larger competitors cannot easily compete with. The other two meetings are along the same lines - looking to work with other companies to provide services that are based on components our competitors don't currently have and that address markets that are not susceptible to their bulldozer marketing/advertising methodologies.
Might be an interesting week.
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