John Linton ....which was 'over' before you realised it had started.
Of most interest, at least to me, was receiving six proposals for our IP, and in three cases, a portion of our carrier inter-connect circuits as well as our general inter-State links. Times are certainly continuing to change and change more rapidly than in the past. My memory is far from reliable but I think our first IP circuit was 10 mbps in February 2004. Since then the IP has been upgraded multiple times each year to it's current level of 8 gbps today with a further 2 gbps already on order and a complete revision planned to go to 12 gbps - 16 gbps by the end of this year currently in progress. The initial offer pricing from several possible suppliers is quite interesting and it will be equally interesting to see what the Exetel people conducting the discussions eventually come up with. For the first time since we started the company I am not in any way involved in these annual discussions which feels very strange.
The main reason for contemplating doubling our current IP is the increasing number of larger business sales our ever growing business sales teams are making. Over the past year there has been a steady increase in business customers buying 100 mbps links from Exetel and the first 200 mbps link was sold in January. The current 'prospect' list has several more 200 mbps companies on it and the first 500mbps and 1 gbps companies are showing, apparently, genuine interest in our IP and data service offerings. Of course all of the prospective customers we find for such services already have current suppliers and those suppliers are very, very anxious to retain that business - but they have the same problem with their IP customers as they do with their data link customers - they have been quite content to rip off their current customers by charging huge money for IP while the prices of international IP has fallen like a stone over the past three years. So if they charged 'today's' prices (let alone tomorrow's prices) to one of their current customers then the 'news' would spread to their other customers in a matter of days and they would be facing a serious financial dilemma.
There is a long way to go and a great deal of new thinking to be applied to the decision of just what we do in terms of inter-State back hauls as well as pure international and national IP but it seems to me that major changes will be necessary if Exetel is to continue to be competitive in the business marketplaces in which we currently operate and the new business market places we are thinking about entering. It will also be interesting to see the extent of the lies the drones who pass themselves off as communications consultants working for our competitors now lower themselves even further to say about Exetel. As our very largest (in terms of company size - a huge US multinational) business customer said this week "In the 18 months I have had your service there has been no downtime and no speed issues - I can't say that about my main link provided by an Australian "Tier One" provider which has had three lots of down time in the same period".
The other interesting 'event' that came very late in the week was a new approach from the Financial Director of a Singaporean company we briefly talked to three years ago when they expressed an interest in buying Exetel. He has now left that company and is working in his own M and A consultancy. He wrote to us saying he was working for a company that wanted to acquire a company in Australia and if Exetel was interested in selling he would arrange a meeting to determine whether it was sensible to seriously discuss such a proposition. That is the third 'semi-real' approach Exetel has had (ignoring the half dozen or so the 'non-real approaches') we have had in the past six months - something seems to be happening that I don't know about - but then I suppose that is true of my general lack of understanding of most things for the whole of my business and personal lives.
Whenever we have such approaches I have always maintained that any approach from an established Australian ISP/Comms company would never be successful because our infrastructure/PoPs would be regarded as of no interest/value whereas a new company entering Australia would regard them as highly valuable if not integral to the purchase. While I doubt the latest approach will result in anything at least it makes more sense than selling out to a current Australian ISP; assuming we could bring ourselves to ever do such a thing.
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