John Linton .......so I took advantage of it being 'the weekend' and slept in for one of the few times this year.
We spent the week tidying up new plans/pricing for all of our different services except ADSL2 which we will complete on Monday. It is painstaking, detailed work that is very tiring when you spend almost all of five consecutive days on it as well as trying to keep up with your 'normal' work schedule. There is so much movement by the larger companies in the areas in which we operate and so many individual price changes required to be looked at that it is quite an exercise to go through for the people who are involved....several of them for the first time in such 'exercises'.
So we dealt with ADSL1, pre-paid wireless broadband, postpaid wireless broadband, SMS, FoIP, MoIP, ADSL1 and some aspects of VoIP as well as reviewing our business EOC and Fibre offerings (without reaching a decision on those) and did most of the work on ADSL2 which will be completed next week. In doing so we looked at 8 larger competitors current and changed offerings and became ever more convinced that most of them are becoming quite panic stricken at the moment so goodness knows what will happen when all of the changes those companies will make percolate through the current minds of the current residential buyers. I don't think that any of the changes currently made, meat axish as they are, are any real indication of what is to come between now and Christmas.
Doubtless, in our larger competitors, there are much cleverer people than I am who have been involved in this industry for a couple of decades or more who would know exactly what has happened and is going to happen over the coming months and years. If there aren't then the chaos that is overtaking residential communications in Australia will not end 'prettily'. I also understand that the "worst effects of the GFC were brilliantly avoided by Krudd, Whine and Ms Faustus but Australia's general business community was, despite their lying claims, also dealt a massive blow over the past three years we have had a Labor government - at least according to the non-political ABS statistics:
http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/full-hit-of-gfc-on-australian-business-revealed-20101021-16vwm.html
Those are very ugly figures and when you consider the demise of Soul, Westnet, PeopleTelecom, Netspace and AAPT Residential as well as an unknown number of smaller ISPs over that period in our industry it puts in perspective just how hard business has been and still is - irrespective of what anybody says - for their own purposes (take out mineral exports and you have a very bleak landscape). So, apart from how good we have it in this country it seems to me, from what I observe of our competitors actions and what I observe in our own P and L that these
are as tough a set of times as the Australian communications industry has ever seen....and that's without the effects of the 'NBN2'.
The one 'beacon of light' in this tough and demanding week was the ever more frequent ring of the corporate sales bell signifying another new data link corporate sale (8 yesterday). We continue to make progress in building an ever more knowledgeable and skillful corporate sales force and as well as the increasing number of data link sales made each
month the number of VoIP sales is increasing by similar amounts. What remained of the week was spent on VoIP and the new small business services which didn't get the time they needed due to everything else taking so long. Although we haven't made as much progress as we had planned (perhaps hoped would be a more appropriate word to use) I am very glad we have the current profit contribution made by corporate data services each month in these strange times. Our major focus now is to more rapidly build out the corporate market places we operate in and more finely focus the services we can provide and increase the differentiation between what we offer and what the companies we compete with offer.
I don't know whether these are interesting times. I am inclined to think that times are changing, and not for the better, across most aspects of Western societies and we may well, as a species, have seen the best we are able to create......or maybe I'm just too old.
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