John Linton ....what, if anything, has changed?
Exetel has begun to get a trickle of orders for NBNCo fibre services from users of other ISPs over the past week as it became possible for any end user who had access to NBNCo infrastructure to order fibre services from any NBNCo reseller (as opposed to during the trial only being able to order a fibre service from their current ADSL provider). However the number of premises where NBNCo fibre is actually available is still scarcely more than a 'handful' so there can be no remotely significant number of new fibre orders for quite some time yet. Of the customers who ordered a trial service only one so far has canceled it and decided to stay with ADSL though we expect that to increase as people return from school holidays....to what extent we currently have no idea but are currently doubting that will exceed 10 - 15%.
One of the things I noticed while I was in the UK (which has no government interference in the communications market) was it had a more fractured ADSL set of offerings than I had noticed the previous year (there was even a new "Yorkshire" based ISP offering "real Yorkshire based support speaking plain Yorkshire"). It was almost strange, after Australia for the past 4 years, to see absolutely no mention of fibre internet in the UK communications media dealing with residential services. What you did see was pricing way lower than the lowest available here and quite incredibly low telephony pricing. What you also saw was a plethora of wireless broadband offerings at the 20 gb/12 mbps+ speeds for around the ten pound per month price levels which re-emphasised that not every advanced country in the world thinks like Australia's Labor government....actually none do.
So in Australia, now the NBNCo services are 'generally available' wherever the NBN has been turned on and that program will now accelerate, it will be interesting to see just how many services are activated each month....and more interesting to see what investments the various ISPs make in promoting those services in the relatively few places they are currently available. I have been contacted by more than a couple of journalists writing articles about the 'general availability' of NBNCo fibre services for the October 1st editions of their publications but I didn't notice anything particular. They seemed to be expecting massive advertising and promotion campaigns which seemed to indicate that they had no idea of how tiny the current marketplaces are in terms of actual numbers of fibred premises. The relentless hyperbole deployed by Ms Faustus and Stupid Stephen certainly seems to have worked on the less intellectually abled of the media who apparently believed that there were tens of thousands of people just waiting to be allowed to connect - they seemed quite taken aback to be told that the number was probably less than 600 or 700.
Over the coming months the actual take up of NBNCo fibre services will be interesting to read about as the louder mouthed ISPs spruik their successes or at least their claimed successes. Without Telstra or Optus being involved it will not provide any real indications of what the take up will be like when it is 'real' but will give some sort of indication. One key future ingredient will be the re-wholesale of NBNCo fibre in terms of the sort of pricing that will be made available - particularly from Optus and NextGen - but I have seen no sign of that as yet. Despite all the millions of column centimeters to date to the contrary - NBNCo fibre take up is a long, long way below what is ignorantly claimed. No problem - it is only now that the actual numbers will need to slowly begin to stack up against the media myths. The actual numbers/percentages will begin to tell a story sometime next year at the earliest.
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