John Linton .....which means that calendar 2011 is almost over - gone, like so many recent years in the blink of an eye.
I know this is the case because I sent out the details of Exetel's Christmas party late last week and regretfully declined my fifth "catch up" invitation from Exetel's suppliers earlier today. Why suppliers think that such events are of any benefit to anyone or reach even a minimum level of 'enjoyment' is beyond my comprehension. In my experience the only enjoyable such event I have attended in the whole of my business life was an Hitachi customer 'cocktail' party in Las Vegas at one of the function rooms at the Mirage some thirty years ago. The food was exceptionally good, the liquor was off the top shelf and the myriad entertainments were straight out of the Las Vegas showrooms. It was the format that we have tried to emulate for our Exetel Christmas parties (with a much less flamboyant budget) but I have never seen any supplier come close to - quite possibly because the people they invite would feel more at home in some outer suburban Leagues Club.
It is a reminder that the current year is rapidly drawing to a close and that the doldrums of 'the Christmas season and the whole of January are nearly upon us once more which means we look back at the last six months of the year and try to make sense out of what has happened so that we can adjust our 'forecasts' as to what might happen over the remaining six months of this financial year. One issue,of course, remains just what will happen in terms of the NBNCo roll out which, like the year just ending, produced millions of 'column inches' but ended up with less than 1,000 customers connected.....never in the history of Australian communications "journalism" (perhaps any "journalism") has so much been written about so little. Unless something occurs that is not currently predicted, it seems as though the NBNCo 'roll out' will have as little affect on CY2012 as it did on CY2011.
What may have more affect in residential communications land is the proposed "separation" of Telstra into retail and wholesale....if in fact that happens in any real way.....and that is still, at least to me, highly doubtful. Why do I take such a strange view? Because the only real way of having a national fibre network is for there to be a change of government at the next Federal election and for the current NBNCo infrastructure to be sold to Telstra for 'nothing' and for Telstra to 'turn on' its current fibre in the capital cities and continue to build out the fibre in regional and country areas where it is vaguely practical and to use its 4G/LTE wireless everywhere else.....but then I said that when Krudd was lying to the gullible electorate to get himself elected more than 4 years ago.....so I am still probably wrong.
One less important, but quite pleasant, change to Australian internet usage will happen in 2012 and that is the massive increase in trans-Pacific IP bandwidth as a result of the next Southern Cross upgrade. This is already being seen in the steady reduction in SX IP costs that is hitting new lows from at least some of the major providers. What it already means is that IP is becoming a smaller and smaller component of the cost of providing internet services to both residential and corporate users and it that will become even less over 2012 as the various SX providers work out just how to handle what each of their competitors will do with each others customers. A nice problem not to have. As someone who was around in the days when IP bandwidth cost something like $A800,000 a year for 2 mbps (I really can't remember the exact figures 15 or 16 years ago) it still comes as a shock to understand that it now costs less than 10 cents to provide 1 gigabyte of data to your egress router....of course while back haul costs have fallen they now represent the majority of the cost of providing a residential internet service to a 'heavy' user.
So, as usual, many things are changing with many more things likely to change as 2012 gets going.
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