John Linton ....though a bit blurry because of the late finish to the tennis. Annette and I had a pleasant lunch yesterday at a local restaurant made even more pleasant by the fact that the owner, maitre-de and some of the floor staff of our long term favourite restaurant were holding a birthday party for the bar 'tendress' (who made the best martini I have ever drunk). Sadly the owner sold out some three plus years ago and the food, wine list and shortly afterwards all of the personnel changed and after 25 years of countless great lunches and dinners we stopped going there. It was nice to exchange a few memories and pleasantries so unexpectedly with such a nice group of people.
We had our best weekend in terms of orders for most residential services for several months which continues the increase in residential service orders experienced over the past 6 or so weeks. It seems the residential ADSL markets have shifted a little under the Telstra Retail onslaught and the exhaustion that has induced in more than a few of the larger ISPs. This is evidenced by the almost deafening silence in terms of public statements of well being by those companies most prone to trumpet their ongoing success and by the number of resumes we receive each week from 'more senior' employees of a surprising number of much bigger communications providers than we are. There is also a considerable amount of changing 'attitudes' from our small suppliers who we have always treated very well in terms of making sure we pay them well within their payment terms and always advising them when their prices are becoming uncompetitive.
The other quite significant change that has occurred over the last few months and now accelerated since we fully activated the Google caching cluster in the North Sydney PoP is just how much the Akamai, PeerApp, Pipe peering and now Google caches are delivering in terms of percentage of total IP traffic - currently around 30% of total IP. Apart from significantly reducing the costs of 'pure' IP it obviously reduces latency and therefore increase the average speed of delivery for many users for a variety of traffic types.
Another, quite surprising, aspect of residential business is becoming apparent. This is the fall in average downloads in both April and May and continuing into June. Yesterday was the lowest network usage for over twelve months and there is nothing that comes to my mind that would account for this reduction. We have obviously lost a significant percentage of our large download customers to TPG's and other ISPs 'unlimited' and 'terabyte' plans but the continuing fall in average usage doesn't seem explicable by that factor alone. It is a surprising situation but let's hope the trend continues - maybe more people have finally downloaded the whole internet?
I have a particularly busy week with two crucial decisions that I have deferred for too long needing to be made and more meetings with 'out side' people than usual on issues that could be very important to us. This is also the week that we make the key decisions on just what we will devote our efforts to in the coming financial year as well as ensuring that we finish this financial year in the best ways possible. Companies of Exetel's size never have enough decision making capabilities and while nothing we do is even vaguely important it tends to weigh more heavily on us in June than any other month of the year.
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