John Linton Well, another Christmas has passed and I hope you had a pleasant and enjoyable day in whatever manner you chose to spend it. I ate too much (as usual) and drank too much (as usual) but otherwise had a very enjoyable day with the few members of our family who were able to make it to Christmas dinner/lunch.
Christmas day is very quiet, for all the obvious reasons, in terms of receiving orders but our automated systems don't take public holidays or 'sickies' so they processed double the orders they did last Christmas Day. The actual order volumes are so small that isn't anything like as impressive as it sounds but it is significantly better than processing 50% of last Christmas Day's volume. Perhaps it's a 'sign' that residential business has 'turned the corner' and all our efforts over the past few years will finally result in some tangible increases in the number of customers who understand that low priced services can be provided without any compromise to speed or quality....I am encouraged to think this may be the case by the fact that almost no Exetel customer moves to TPG anymore and an increasing number of customers who did churn to TPG have been 'returning' to Exetel over the past year.
The other noticeable 'statistic' is the almost zero churn away rate to Internode and iinet over the whole of 2011. Our statistics show the churn away rate to iinet has been almost zero since we began collecting meaningful statistics but the churnaway rate to Internode fell sharply over the past 24 months and to zero over the past few months. Churn aways to companies like Primus, Adam and Optus are practically non-existent with only Telstra dominating churn away destinations and, over the past six months, Dodo beginning to figure in the stats. However, mainly because the Telstra "win back" campaigns have moderated, churn away daily numbers have fallen by 75% over the past almost six months while churn to numbers have more than doubled. Perhaps there are deep changes beginning to affect the residential ADSL marketplaces replacing the wave after wave of unrelenting 'win back' offers by Telstra?
Over the past month or so we have looked at the few 'NBN2 Wholesale' offers that are being tentatively promoted. All of them are commercially non-viable at the moment but, and this seems to contradict everything ever averred about 'NBN2' pricing, there seem to be indications of a change in the overall 'NBN2' pricing that will provide large buyers (Telstra springs to mind) to buy at preferential pricing that would allow, possibly, a true wholesale arrangement to be put in place. At the moment the wholesale offers are a non-event and offer absolutely nothing in terms of commercial viability - but that may well change assuming that Stupid Stephen, Juliar and co can handle yet another 'policy reversal' along the Carbon tax lines of - "and I promise you there will never........." To date there has been no advantages for the Exetel customers who have changed from ADSL to NBNCo and that seems likely to be the case, at least for Exetel, for some considerable time. May well be different for FoxTel of course.
I am trying to finalise the Exetel small business offering over the next few days. The small business ADSL plans we are currently offering have been generating more interest each month since we began to more seriously address these market places and I am encouraged enough by the progress to date to try a bit harder than we have in the past. Part of our plans for next year are to put in place a dedicated outbound sales force and a dedicated small business support team to build our sales of ADSL small business offerings on the basis that, one day, these would be a more sensible way of using any eventual 'NBN2' services than stealing more movies/TV shows more quickly which, as far as I can see is the only residential use for NBNCo services at the moment. 'NBN2' is years away from impacting on the business marketplaces but, one day, 'NBN2' or Telstra or, outside chance, someone else will provide fibre business services that will be more usable than ADSL.
If residential ADSL sales continue to improve over the coming year as they have over the past few months it would make it much easier to deal with the 'NBN' issues than seemed likely a year ago....the long time frames involved in an NBNCo fibre solution for businesses can be more than adequately addressed by ADSL2 in the meantime.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46