John Linton .....in the residential ADSL marketplaces.
I mentioned in the early days of January that orders for Exetel residential ADSL services were running at 2 - 3 times the volumes of the equivalent days of 2011. In those 'dog days' volumes are very low and it doesn't take much to distort those daily figures. However, 18 days in to the month daily residential ADSL orders remain at over 250% of the same period last year and yesterday we had our highest residential order day for over 12 months.
Another noticeable 'feature' of the order volume is that churn order sources are very different from previous months. We can never get precise numbers for 'churns' but the numbers we do collect are showing that the highest number of churns are from the small/very small ISPs who have overtaken both Telstra and TPG as the largest supplier of churn customers to Exetel. This has never happened before and must be indicative of something or other. Another strange statistic is that 'new' versus 'churn' orders have increased quite dramatically as a percentage over last January. January is usually a very strong month for 'new' orders as 'renters' favour this month and next to move premises and university students usually cancel their ADSL service in December and resign in late January through to early March....accounting for a seasonal disparity in 'new' versus 'churn'.
Telstra and TPG remain the largest single sources of churns to Exetel though Internode is becoming almost as large as TPG.....something you wouldn't have seen prior to their latest round of price increases and the takeover by iinet. Having said that, if you sum the churns from iinet, Westnet, Netspace and AAPT residential, that agglomeration is now reaching Telstra size and if current trends continue will exceed it in the near future. All in all the churn figures are showing different trends and different patterns to any previous month and certainly different sources. The new customer orders are also showing different patterns in terms of plan sizes. It is a confusing stream of data and is unprecedented in our experience which is something we need to sort out unless it 'settles down' in February.
We will have to develop some new analytics to try and find a coherent ordering pattern for these services which seem to have dramatically increased at a time when we have been seriously considering 'reducing the emphasis' we place on marketing and supporting residential ADSL services. It may, of course, just be a temporary aberration and order volumes will begin to return to 'normal' as the year begins to resume 'normal service'. Like so much of the past three plus years - it is very different to what it used to be in the 'good old days'. Perhaps this sort of anomaly will become more usual as the current changes in the suppliers to the residential ADSL marketplaces work their way through the 'system'. If the number of providers continues to become less you would expect the permutations to reduce.....at least I would have thought that would be the case.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204555904577167873208040252.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_INTL_LSMODULE