John Linton ....and although this article is largely BS:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/small-internet-service-providers-make-a-dash-for-the-door/story-e6frgakx-1225997686242
it is a continuing indication of what the ABS reports every six months for free - that small ISPs can't compete at all and any sized ISPs are making less money than they once did from providing ADSL services. I don't know why a company like iinet would bother "researching" the small end of the ISP market (as I said the ABS publishes 6 monthly reports on that exact subject) so any statistics are likely to be - well - not really statistics and are just an obvious statement of what the ABS has been reporting for three or four years. Also the self serving comment that iinet have increased their ADSL customer base is undoubtedly untrue (and once you subtract the purchases will show that iinet lost customers over every six month period for the past four years) it continues to go South.
Today is recurrent billing day and it was another record month for Exetel - unsurprising as the recent price increases for out of residential ADSL customers vastly overwhelmed the usual January slow down in telephone calls and excess usage charges and the student cancellations of ADSL services during the long university annual break. Our loss of residential customers turned out to be a little below my expectations and far below those of anyone else who predicted what they would be - for which we are all very grateful to our long term customers (surprisingly almost 20% of our residential customer base has been with us for more than six years). Our corporate revenue was solidly up - despite the embargo and our mobile revenue also grew strongly with all other services holding their own in the quietest billing month of the year. All in all it was a very positive start to what looks like being an even tougher six months to the July - December period of 2010. Though it would be best to wait until the larger companies make their half yearly reports and the ABS publishes their July 1 - December 31 2010 statistics.
Perhaps all of the tiny ISPs will disappear this year - it has been a continuing trend for some four years and has to reach zero at some point in time. Perhaps some of the larger ISPs will get out of the residential ISP business this year - clearly Netspace didn't consider it worth the effort of remaining in a business they had been in for a very long time. But, I would have thought, that there aren't going to be any real communications companies getting out of residential ADSL in the current year because no matter how far away the 'NBN2' is in reality the medium sized ISPs that are left will take the view that it is closer to being 'switched on' in some real places than it was last year and if they have made the efforts required to survive last year they may as well hang on a little longer to see if Ms Faustus desperation to make it appear to be viable results in better port pricing than is being offered by Telstra and Optus and their own DLAMs.
So, my guess would be that none of the small medium/medium sized ADSL service providers would fold their tents and disappear into the night this year. If Ms Faustus wants to get "re-elected" (bearing in mind she wasn't actually elected last time) she will have to make it 'look' like the 'NBN2' is being delivered which means that she will have to take a deep breath and make the pricing artificially low to attract any current ISP to use it. By definition this almost certainly means that she will have to offer 'NBN2' ports at significantly lower costs than current ADSL2 ports with equivalently attractive back haul options or no-one will bother to make the switch. This in turn will result in most wholesale ISPs 'fire saling' their ADSL ports to scrape the last money they will ever get from those DSLAMs where 'NBN2' is turned on. That's the way I currently see it.
Then, of course, for those people who continue to think that wireless is not really something a fibre network has to worry about articles such as this:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Ericsson-sets-MCHSPA-speed-record-with-prototype-device/1296497667
keep those with less blinkered vision aware that wireless is going to become very much a preferred option for some, as yet unknown, percentage of the residential data marketplace. If you don't believe that check the next set of ABS statistics.
So, a new month and new targets and new 'challenges' - fortunately it's a lovely summer's day in Sydney.
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