John Linton
.......and the very weak go out of business:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/151448,ecomtel-folds-blames-telstra-adsl-billing-dispute.aspx
...which seems a bit odd that if you've been in business for ten years and have enjoyed 60 day terms from your major supplier that you get yourself in to so much trouble that this actually happens to you. 60 day terms from Telstra......I must be the worst commercial negotiator in the world as even with giving Telstra a $A1,000,000 bond Exetel only gets 14 day terms - not that I have a problem with that as I see no reason to need more than that and we have paid on time for the whole time we've purchased services from them....in most ways short payment terms are much safer; especially in 'tough economic times'. Unless, as appears to be the case here, you are using your supplier's money to finance your loss making business.
I have never heard of Ecomtel and therefore have no idea of what size user base they had or what volume of business they did with Telstra. From the very small amounts mentioned in the cited article it didn't seem to very much but of course there is no context for the few numbers that are mentioned. I haven't heard of a Telstra forced closure for a while, not that means anything as I imagine most such events are likely to involve very small companies and wouldn't get even this amount of low key media attention. (I wouldn't have noticed it except it cited Exetel which 'rang a signal bell').
While I would be the first person to agree that there are many, many errors on many communications companies bills I am a little surprised that a company can be in business for ten years and therefore have survived these 'taxes' for long enough to either build them in to their monthly cost of sales or to have reached some other process of dealing with them.....I know we have had to do that and I have known many other companies that have had to do that for more than 20 years.
So is this some sort of new 'trend' within Telstra? In the lead up to whatever they think will be lead up to some new 'accommodation' with the Labor party or are they 'clearing their books' of the more reluctant payers to maximise their asking price from the Federal Government for selling them back their wholesale business? Or is it a slow news day and one of the Ecomtel owners has some media contacts and wanted to put a sort of acceptable version of the "story" so he saves a bit of face? In changing the trading terms from 60 days to 30 days there could only be one result for a company already struggling to pay its bills and Telstra would have known exactly what would happen.
Personally I don't understand how there can be a situation where Telstra's routers/servers could be:
"the incumbent's usage meters for ADSL were faulty and resulted in "grossly overcharged excess charges""
- and I have no idea what the Telstra product/service could be that a wholesale customer would buy that is measured in megabytes but I'm pretty sure that Telstra's data measurement systems are unlikely to be significantly incorrect for over three years - and I think very poorly of Telstra's systems generally.
So I'm puzzled - I have little doubt that there was no real billing error that extended over three years (if there had been it would have been very easy to demonstrate by Ecomtel) and that the real issues was slow/no payment. My puzzlement is why it took so long for Telstra to decide to take the action it did and whether there is something more important than simply a single incident of ceasing supply to one problem customer and is there something that I should take more trouble to become aware of?