John Linton ......began quietly as is appropriate for its connotations. Though Arsenal played a better game than midweek and their very attractive style was fully displayed it was somehow a deeply unsatisfying game re-arousing the frustration of the Wigan fixture of dropping two points out of arrogance of selection (and a persistent lack of height in defence). Anyway - any win will do away from home and against a team that, for whatever reasons, they have trouble beating over the past few years. The very hot day in Sydney discouraged any desire to move out of the air conditioning or do anything that required physical effort so it was a very quiet day during which I did very little other than to read the physical and on line 'papers' and catch up on my personal/family correspondence - a pleasant way to spend a day.
The only work related efforts I made yesterday were aimed at trying to make some sense out of the various information that has come my way of wireless activities around Australia by the various vendors and the widening array of resellers. We have made no real progress in offering wireless services over the past six months as the issues in the residential ADSL markets have absorbed so much time there has been none left to address anything else except superficially. Perhaps I'm missing understanding the subtleties of what is actually happening because I can't see that much has changed. Our new customer intake has slowed because we decided not to take the dishonest path of severely under provisioning the network that is employed by so many of our competitors including our wholesale supplier. Not out of stupidity, as some people allege, but because being that deliberately dishonest is something we were brought up not to be.
So, having chosen to be honest, we obviously can't make promises we have no intention of keeping and therefore cannot match the apparent offers of our competitors. Our approach of making this reasoning clear on our web site is producing a very slowly increasing number of net new wireless customers and a steadily increasing number of emails from customers who have transferred from other carriers and resellers saying how delighted they are to actually get a consistently faster connection with fewer drop outs (most of these customers transferred from Optus, Virgin and Dodo) but there are Testra 'refugees' as well. So, maybe one day, honesty will pay off and more end users will realise that the patchy service they get from their wireless broadband service isn't due to "tower congestion" but to the cynical dishonesty of their carrier/reseller.
I plugged the information I have been too lazy/busy with other things to do anything with over the past 2 - 3 months into my crude wireless broadband model and saw that things had changed quite a bit from August/September. We will have to wait until the ABS publishes its December 31st 2010 statistic update but it looks as though the patterns set in the USA and the EU (which seem to lead what happens in Australia by about 18 - 24 months over the past 5 years) are now becoming evident in Australia. As in those international markets the decline in residential wire line use is directly matched to the increase in wireless broadband use and the age group demographics matches those declines/increase almost exactly (18 - 35 - the unit dwelling/university accommodation using age group).
What comes as a surprise to me is that the trend seems to have significantly quickened since I last 'assembled' the various data sources relating to these areas. As I said, I wouldn't begin to rely on my crude modeling with its inadequate inputs but it will be interested to see the ABS figures and Telstra's half yearly update when they become available. Not that it's, in any way, reliable but my model's output shows Australian residences without wire line telephony (and therefore ADSL) being close to 20% at the moment - not the 14/15% commonly reported.
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