John Linton We had the Exetel Christmas party last night for our Australian personnel which was at a new location within the casino (Bistro 80) as they have demolished the old section that contained our long term venue - the Mill Room. We followed the same format as in the past six years - a lot of high quality finger food (more than sufficient for even the most voracious eaters) and an open bar with high quality alcohol. The entertainment was a reprise of the tarot card fortune teller, the caricaturist and the up close 'magician ' who have been a 'hit' for a number of years plus a, very, short 'speech' on the main achievements of 2011 (few) and some insights in to the changes planned for 2012 (many). Two and a half hours of accelerated alcohol consumption before most people headed for the gambling floor to turn their gift chips into a small fortune - or not - as the case may be and others went to party on at some other locations. From the volume of general noise and laughter it was a very pleasant party.
We also had a good sales day yesterday in most aspects of the corporate and business product sets though there are the first signs of the Christmas 'slow down' in residential land with Friday probably being a major company function day/night with many people concentrating on getting to and from their Christmas parties to bother much about ordering as many residential telecommunications services as they would normally do from Friday afternoon on into the night....certainly the dearth of residential orders so far today indicates a much higher rate of morning afteritis than is usual on a 'normal' Saturday morning. I feel slightly more like 'Christmas' with only trying to make the most of the remaining 'working' days that remain in December.
http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2011/12/09/3387365.htm
There is now 'breathing space' to consider the key aspect of providing telecommunications services beyond 2013 - and of course that is what part the NBNCo will play in future business and residential services and depends on whether or not there still be a sort of Labor government beyond the next election?....which of course is impossible to predict. Looking at the 'roll out' plans from NBNCo, nothing much will happen over 2012 in terms of new service delivery and even in 2013 not much extra 'coverage' will be provided. In residential terms this makes absolutely no difference to what Exetel, or most other ISPs, will provide in terms of percentages of NBNCo services versus Telstra/their own DSLAM services. The issue now is - is it possible to put some sort of small business strategy in place in those areas where there is NBNCo coverage? We will spend some time over the balance of December and then most of
January trying to work out some sort of method(s) of providing business
services over the NBNCo fibre.
Why business rather than residential? Because, really, at this time the 'need' for 100mbps fibre is simply not required by more than a handful of residential users (and that is wildly exaggerating the demand) and as there is no cost saving from replacing an ADSL service with fibre what demand there will be will be in places where no ADSL is available - and those are the most expensive markets to service - for all the obvious reasons. Business users in those areas will be a far more sensible 'market' to address because of their very different needs and the requirement to provide a real set of 'add on' services such as business telephone, fax, SMS, hardware and - above everything else - real support beyond a 'connection up' level. Assuming the NBNCo continues beyond the next federal election (and it is pretty difficult to run a 'wait and see' strategy for two years) then any telecommunications company has to have a sensible strategy to address a change from ADSL to fibre and that is not going to be based on providing residential services in the same nightmare scenario that now exists in supplying residential ADSL services - what sane person would ever contemplate doing that?
So there is now some six weeks to try and work out, assuming it's possible, just what will happen if the Telstra monopoly is actually going to be replaced with another federal government monopoly and, if that is the case, what should a company of Exetel's size do in that scenario? I wouldn't want to pre-judge the results of some sensible thinking but I would be surprised if it involved providing residential services.
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