John Linton We, pretty much, completed the work on residential ADSL offerings yesterday and, courtesy of our carrier providers, have improved the value proposition of all plans for all levels of usage quite significantly. These new plans saw an immediate 'boost' of take up of the Telstra plans but saw a dramatic fall in the take up of Optus plans - a truly puzzling result when you consider the plan costs became lower and the included downloads became higher. It was a totally unexpected result of baffling proportions. We will obviously have to re-present the Optus plan proposition because this current result defies all logic that I have ever seen used in this business. I think it is the most unexpected result we have ever generated from a plan change.
Some time over the weekend we will have to find a different way of presenting the pricing of those plans but, right at this moment, I don't know where to start. Perhaps the 'scummy' nature of their presentation was a step too far and much too radical for a conservative company like Exetel? In any event we will need to make some significant changes to try and correct the current major negative results. Perhaps we need to offer free months instead of rock bottom monthly charges?
We continued to see an increase in mobile sales and, perhaps, more significantly the majority of that increase came from 'standalone' sales - new customers only buying mobile services rather than current ADSL customers adding mobile services to obtain discounts from their ADSL services. The other trend was an increasing number of customers buying multiple mobile services. As I mentioned earlier in the week - residential mobile services will exceed residential ADSL services for the first time in Exetel's 'history' this month.This is, almost as surprising a positive reaction as the negative reaction to the revised Optus plans - and we add no real value whatsoever to the mobile services.
We had a very solid corporate sales week getting close to our pretty tough net plus revenue target which looks pretty certain to be met over the two remaining days of May next week with another 100 link sales month. Another of our latest batch of probationers reached her probationary target (10 sales in less than 4 months) during the week and the remaining four probationers continue to make good progress. Smaller business sales made by the Colombo based outbound sales reps continue to increase and their sales of VoIP to small/small medium business customers has already set a new record in May and will, with a bit of luck, reach 50 this month for the first time....a quite remarkable achievement.
The new Google cache (provided by Google) has finished its 'self population' process and is now providing an additional 800 mbps of fast IP for Exetel customers - mainly youtube content. This brings the total 'IP' capacity deliverable by Exetel to just on 10 gbps - a far cry from the 10 mbps we started with in February 2004 - a 1,000 fold growth over 7 and a bit years. The remainder of the net work upgrades planned for FY 2011 may not be completed by June 30th but the fifth Sydney PoP and the second Brisbane PoP are well on the way and may, if the provisioning Gods smile for once, may 'go live' before the end of the financial year.
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