John Linton ....may have a 2,000 year old meanings much less trivial than I'm hijacking the phrase for but it seems to perfectly describe my limitations in understanding the current residential communications markets. No matter how hard I try I simply can't seem to understand what is going on - beyond the obvious consequences of a saturated market (at least for ADSL) and the dominant supplier (Telstra Retail) desperate to "win back" market share and with a frighteningly large 'marketing' budget to do that. So the head line phrase I used exactly describes my situation at the moment - I can dimly see various things but I can't make them out in enough detail to really understand what is truly going on.
I appreciate that I am not the only person having difficulty grasping the details of the current situation - every time I talk with one of Exetel's suppliers I struggle to work out whether they have wonderful acting abilities or they cannot understand the current situations any better than I can. I base that view on the, seemingly, startlingly naive statements they make about their understanding of the current marketplaces and the actions of the various competitors within those marketplaces. Two press reports about Internode in the last few days exemplify what I mean:
http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/mobility/43605-intermode-boosts-nodemobile-wireless-broadband-quotas
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/governments-broadband-not-up-to-speed-at-tasmanian-school/story-e6frg6nf-1225961150410
Now, you may well read the statements by 'Internode spokespeople' differently to the way I do. However when a company says it is increasing connectivity by 400% it only means one thing to me - the bandwidth up to the time of upgrade was woefully inadequate. Similarly when a provider ascribes slow user speeds to "problems with Bass Strait back haul" it only means they don't have enough ( as the forced subsequent retraction of those statements clearly indicated). No problem - these things can happen for all sorts of reasons but, in both these cases, they can't blame this situation on 'up stream' providers as both suppliers (and we know this as we use both suppliers referenced) can upgrade these circuits in 48 hours.
Again, these things can happen to any provider at any time (including Telstra) but Internode has always made a song and dance about its past provisioning policies that it appears very odd to have moved away from their stated "massively over provisioned, golden network" to a point where under provisioning appears apparent in at least two key services. The issue isn't that it happened and was addressed but that it happened at all. Only one reason springs to mind - less money is available these days at Internode to provision links as they did in the past.....most likely reason for that is.....form your own views....but it appears to have caused a significant change in company policy. That is just one example of my inability to understand what is happening around us and I only use it because of the third party references rather than quoting statements made by people I talk with.
It's a strange time in my, longer than most, time in the communications industry I have never been so 'lost' as to what is likely to happen 'next'. This is not a good way to be when your principal activities over the coming days are to revise a business plan.
PS: Not wishing to say "I told you so" but those of you that read these musings regularly might remember that I have been saying since June that for all Labor's tub thumping about how good the economy is - I said that I, and the business people I talk with, saw it very differently:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/economy-moves-into-the-slow-lane-20101201-18gn7.html
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46