Saturday, September 4. 2010No Fool Like An Old, Naive, FoolJohn Linton .....who ignores the blindingly obvious even when a scenario can only be caused by one situation. Exetel has struggled to build a sensible wireless broadband business for a month or so short of two years now. We have certainly built a realistic and surprisingly stable residential customer base and have continued to slowly build an even more stable business customer base. Throughout that time we have struggled to match, let alone surpass, the pricing/bandwidth offers of any of the carriers or even their larger resellers. This has reached a point where we have considered abandoning the investments in time and money we have put into wireless and simply left it to the people who can offer so much for so little.....something we simply can't do and haven't been able to do since 'day one'. I actually reached the point where my metaphorical 'pen' was hovering over the metaphorical 'paper' on which I was going to advise our provider that we would cease promoting the service to residential users completely and only provide wireless broadband to business users. My reason for not ceasing to promote the wireless service to business users was that there are several business users (including a long term personal acquaintance) who all make the same comment - "Exetel's Optus wireless service is so much faster with zero drop outs than other "Optus Wireless" services they have tried from Virgin, Dodo, Internode and Optus themselves. I have found this to be true over the past year or so and have even confirmed this "strange phenomenon" with the Optus manager responsible for the wholesale wireless service. This "phenomenon" manifests itself in a simple way. Put an Exetel "Optus" laptop next to an "Optus/Virgin/Dodo/Internode Laptop and do a speed test of the 'other' user's choice and compare the results. The Exetel "Optus" service will deliver a much faster result than any of the other four "Optus" wireless services - using the same source data from the same tower/cell from the same location at the identical time. Over the past eighteen months I have conducted this test some 8 - 10 times and the result is always the same. If I had been conducting the same test on two ADSL services (which of course would been logistically impossible) the answer would have been immediately apparent to me as I am sure it is to any reader of these scribblings. However, until yesterday it wasn't obvious to me concerning the HSPA speed test comparisons and I just shrugged my shoulders and was grateful enough to pick up some extra business in the cases where that transpired. In the meanwhile I just plodded on shaking my head at why all Exetel's competitors could offer so much more than we could even when we sold the service at 'cost'. Until yesterday I never did find an answer to this scenario although each time I saw a comparison of two services side by side producing such difference in download speeds (if you do the test in the early evening between 7 pm and 8 pm it is almost 4:1 in Exetel's favour) the answer should have been obvious - unless you are a totally naive fool I suppose. So, what to do? Have an Ethicsectomy? Pretend I come from a different country and parental and education background? Get out of the communications industry? Do what "everyone else does" and feel perpetually nauseous? Give up? Food for thought over the weekend. The very least that can be done is to not go down the ethicsless path of "everyone else" but to change our contract to allow us to use the currently totally unused midnight to 8 am - 10 am - 12 noon periods as we do with ADSL to provide 'free downloads' of some magnitude.......1:1, 1:2 or even perhaps 1:3. We will have to consider the implications of the apparently ethicsless actions of our competitors and maybe we should go down that apparently universally trodden path - and corner the market in Dramamine supplies. If it is in fact true then it would explain why so many wireless broadband users have such a low opinion of wireless broadband that I always struggle to understand as my experience is always so different. It seems lack of ethics can trash a whole technology's reputation in a country. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Trackbacks
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I could believe Optus or the other resellers applying some kind of shaping/traffic control to their own networks, but drop outs?
Would it be in Optus' interest to offer their direct customers a service that seems to have poor coverage, but the coverage is "secretly" great? I think there's likely another explanation Comment (1)
So you are suggesting they apply some shaping. It seems to explain your and others observations. Not sure I understand the motive for them doing this though - won't people still want to load the same webpages and download the same material? Or do you think they intend their customers to be so frustrated they give up? Not great for customer retention.
If you could verify it does happen perhaps you then can market your greater speed. i imagine you have been reluctant to do so without knowing the cause because it could change at any time. The VBB@home service I mentioned yesterday was originally shaped to 'enhance stability', they later trialled turning this 'feature' off and many users got a much better experience. Comments (3)
I don't think it is "shaping".
If it was an ADSL service you would say that the access bandwidth is badly under provisioned as the characteristics are identical. While I could understand a company like Dodo doing that it didn't occur to me that a company that makes such a song and dance about its "gold standard network" would deliberately under provision nor did it ever occur to me that Optus itself or its fully owned 'brand' Virgin would do that. It appears I may have been very naive in making those assumptions. It does explain the dramatically different speeds between Exetel/Optus a X/Optus under identical conditions. To date Exetel has always over provisioned its Layer 2 links and any 'contention' is caused by individual tower congestion if that is ever experienced. Comments (5)
Thanks for the explanation. I never really understood how some optus providers could be underprovisioning more than others when they must use the same towers until now.
Comments (3)
John, I'm sure you've probably thought of this if it is a possibility but (just in case) is there any way you could test your theory by using some sort of tracert tool to track where any delays are?
Comments (3)
Any individual customer could do that if they wished to. They would need something a little more sophisticated than trace route.
But there is now no need for us to do such things because we have read the terms and conditions of the contract that allows such under-provisioning to be implemented. I can see how to reduce Exetel's per gb wireless costs by almost 50% and offer an identical service experience as our competitors using a new contract set of conditions of supply. We won't be doing that but at least we know where we stand now and can not go down that path but still use the current unused bandwidth for those users who find that a bonus. We would never consider doing what companies like Dodo et al appear to be doing. Comments (5)
I know Optus have some type of compression on their own system which is meant to be a cache of some sorts, from experience the images etc in web pages aren't quite as clear, I don't know how they do what they do but I've had the same side by side comparisons with Exetel based service and an Optus direct service on identical hardware and the results always favored Exetel, never had issues with dropouts though, maybe I was lucky
Comments (2)
Hi John
My only suggestion to improve wireless is, as usual, for the end user to be able to set a hard limit on how much they can download so as to not risk excess usage costs. Unfortunately, that might make the plans not profitable for Exetel when used fully, so I'm not sure how you'd deal with that Catch 22. I have had Virgin and Exetel tests come out equal, but I've only done this test a couple of times and this was around midday - so perhaps Virgin has a higher contention ratio than Exetel and it shows up during peak times. Dodo was dead slow, but then the service I tested with was deliberately sold as a 256K speed service from memory. If you do decide to cease promoting HSPA to residential users, do you plan to keep the existing customer base? Cheers, Mike. Comment (1)
If we ever stopped offering wireless broadband to residential users we would leave all current users on their current plans for as long as they wished to lose them.
We stopped offering new Unwired plans almost four years ago and still provide that service to the few remaining users. It was suggested to me yesterday that Exetel should describe its current service as a 'premium' wireless broadband and charge more for it than Telstra does. I have to get my head around just what is being provided by other companies. Comments (5)
My guess would be that Exetel provides more backhaul/bandwidth then the other providers, despite all the claims over the years that the exact opposite is the case.
This Would explain why none of those other companies have the courage to make their fgures available to their customers as Exetel does. I think it would burst a lot of bubbles. Comment (1)
For the first time I'm moving towards the position that might be the case.
Comments (5)
I've just had a 3 month experience of using an ADSL service on a network that is widely touted as being some sort of super network by all the Whirlpool fanbois and just got back to a connection with Exetel as of yesterday
I can state with quite certainty that the people that think they have access some to sort of superior network and don't care about paying the ludicrous pricing for the supposed benefits that using that network is meant to deliver are delusional Comments (2)
If you look at Internode's SDSL offerings through Optus, there are multiple offerings at a given speed. These offerings are differentiated by the amount of backhaul provisioned per connection, so there's a precedent for what you're talking about above.
Although Optus have started using Melbourne-based transit and proxies to get their users onto the net instead of hauling things to Sydney, the performance of my Exetel service is still superior. Comment (1)
I can say the dropouts issue is true... One normal day on Optus for me = my entire year(?) on Exetel.
I did not get any speed difference unless you count "no speed". Optus seemed to be either on or off. And further... When using Optus I was regularly (every other day) presented with the recharge page when I had unused allowance. It's the last part I type of that makes me think... How many support calls do people make ? and was it their way of controlling congestion ? Comment (1)
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