John Linton .......for $A28.00 a month....and no activation charge.
We visited a second hand book shop opened a year or so ago by my favourite quarterly literary review (Slightly Foxed) in the Gloucester Road a minute or so from the tube station before going our separate ways on our last day in the UK. We got the tube with Annette getting off at Knightsbridge to go shopping for a dress to wear at James's wedding and I continued on to Piccadilly to have a haircut and visit some of the most enticing shops (for me) in the world. I ended up buying two pairs of shoes at Crockett & Jones for far too much money but of exceptional value. The last time I visited this shop (the outlet for the factory in the North of England) was in my last year of school in the UK to buy shoes so it been almost 50 years between visits. The service and attention to detail was without blemish and the hand made shoes were not much more expensive than Bally's production line offerings which I have worn for several decades. When Annette eventually returned at around 3 pm we had a sandwich lunch in the Hotel's coffee shop before she returned to the shopping 'fray' having failed to find a suitable dress and will return at some unknown time.
On our tube trips I had written down some of the ads for broadband and telephony and when I got back to the hotel I looked up some of the offers. It's always difficult to work out what is being offered from most ISP web sites but from what I could work out this has to be one of the better 'deals':
http://www.plus.net/residential/bundles.shtml
Pretty impressive value for 95% plus of ADSL2 users I would have thought and much, much lower cost than anything offered in Australia. If you could be bothered, which as it is no direct interest why would you, you would find many similar bundling deals available to UK users and, if my elementary German and French is not deceiving me the same sorts of deals are being offered across the EU. So it seems that there is very little money now being made from ADSL and wire line calls/line rental in the cut throat communications markets that exist here. One of the reasons I do some elementary 'analysis' work while I visit here is to get some idea of how the Australian marketplaces will develop and, at least to date, pricing and 'presentation' of residential communications services here have pretty much predicted what will happen in Australia with a 'lag' of 15 - 18 months.
While such speculation isn't particularly useful 'in detail' it does provide a basis for looking at the general direction of current happenings and some sort of time line for changes in direction and pricing. One thing that has been tracking for four years has been the year on year reduction of the cost of residential data and telephone services. While it's true that costs have fallen sharply year on year it seems, at least to me, that prices have fallen just as sharply - perhaps even more sharply. Not being a carrier this doesn't really affect Exetel but I do wonder how the carriers have dealt with the changes to date and what they are going to do to deal with the steepening declines in "ARPU" in the future? The larger companies have disproportionately high over heads even in their most efficient departments that cannot be sustained if "ARPU" actually does decline to the sorts of levels that UK pricing seems to indicate.
The Rudd/Gillard recklessness in trying to change Australian communications via 'NBN2' is only now being recognised for what it is - action without knowledge or thought. Perhaps the largest danger of this recklessness is the fact that current infrastructures are being casually destroyed with no thought of whether the 'replacement' actually is a replacement - let alone an enhancement. While I understand that wasting tax payer's money by spending it on anything is actually fiscally neutral you have to think that Australia, and its citizens, would be better off with $A30 billion of more hospitals and medical university places than the recreation of Telecom Australia. But then I am not an economist nor a Treasury mandarin.
What is going to happen to the Australian telecommunications industry if revenue per user does continue to fall in conjunction with the infrastructure currently supplying it being destroyed by a separate and unproven infrastructure?
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