John Linton The last piece of the business plan for 2012 is just what part the NBNCo fibre offerings will, or can be made to play. To date there has been little take up by Exetel customers in the few areas we service and we are lucky to see one new NBNCo customer sign up a day at the moment. There are promises of a much larger deployment from now onwards but we have yet to see any sign of that happening so far. Our interest in NBNCo is, like everybody elses - subject to the Telstra separation agreement being signed which isn't showing any sign of meeting its 'before Christmas' dead line.
Looking at the information provided so far there appears to be some chance of being able to use the NBNCo services in a small number of country towns that have previously been locked up by Telstra. Our interest is not in the residential customers in those towns but in the small businesses and the schools, clubs, doctors, dentists and possibly the auto dealers and pharmacists.....as well as all of the other small businesses. Part of our 'drive' into the business marketplaces is to provide a very solid and very attractive small business offering based on the NBNCo fibre services. This is partly because we regard this as an 'untapped' market (due to Telstra's monopoly to date) and partly because we think the many value add on services we can offer will be more highly regarded by small businesses than by residential customers. However the incredible slowness of th roll out means that there will not be many opportunities in 2012 which means we will have to find a substitute service until the NBN is a reality - if it ever becomes a reality.
The obvious difficulties, apart from the erratic nature of the actual roll out, are the sheer uncertainty of the NBNCo's future and the unpredictability of how other NBNCo wholesale customers will approach the initial difficulties of selling the services. I am pretty sure they will show the same clumsiness and lack of imagination they have consistently shown over the past many years and, without any sort of product differentiation, they will flounder in developing viable strategies. Maybe that is a too jaundiced view and they will in fact massively change their ways and come up with a series of brilliant innovations and then execute those innovations perfectly. While that may happen I am not losing any sleep over it. I am pretty sure that the 'package' we have come up with will be more than just a little better than everything I have seen to date and it has its own inbuilt trump card that I am certain cannot be matched by any other provider.
All and any planning is pointless until there is some certainty on the actual roll out which appears to be dependent on the Telstra separation agreement which is anyone's guess as things stand today. The other major problem is the appalling nature of the NBNCo qualification tools, almost entirely manual, that make it very difficult to actually determine whether or not an NBNCo service can be provided to a particular address. That problem, plus everything associated with it, will make the actual provisioning of the service far more difficult than it should be in these early stages. So it looks like it will take some time for us to put in place just how we approach the NBNCo 'opportunity' but we do need to make some sensible decisions in the next few weeks as it is becoming a more important aspect of our future business that it used to be - without the worry of a future coalition government's attitudes and actions. It seems unlikely that NBN services will play any part in next year's plans.
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