John Linton
We have been 'negotiating' for a final IP price with the two companies that have put in realistic prices (realistic in our views) and have reached a price which, while not wonderful is sufficient for our current purposes. We will, we are assured, receive the last 'final' bid from the last of our preferred longer term providers early next week but even if that bid doesn't better meet our needs we could choose either of the current 'firm' bids and put in place the plan changes that will be required over the coming months. I'm not sure whether I am getting too old to do this job as effectively as I once did or whether I am expecting too much but the end results this year are not what I had hoped for. Perhaps it's just that Exetel hasn't 'kept up the pace' and in these difficult times our residential business is less important than it has been in the past?
Irrespective of whether we should have done better or not in these negotiations the worst price we received has allowed us to almost double the current bandwidth at no additional cost to we are paying now and allows us to release the three ADSL2 unlimited plans to our current customers by early next week. The slight delay was caused while we waited to see if TPG were really brave enough to try and offer telephone voice services over the old Comindico network. From my reading of their plan announcement they weren't that brave, at least right now, so their offer is scarcely, if at all any better than the AAPT plan it was addressing.....as far as I can see.
So, TPG's 'timidity' will allow us to offer unlimited ADSL2 plans that are lower cost than either AAPT's or TPG's (in three different formats - line inc, byo line and 'naked' which neither TPG nor AAPT can do) and give our own users no reason to move away from us and allow us to assess the impact of unlimited downloads with the cushion of an additional 4 gbps of 'real' bandwidth as well as some unknown amount of peered/cached bandwidth. In the meantime it 'protects' us from an influx of 'download the internet because its free type users' new customers which will continue to move from other ISPs to TPG and AAPT. At this pricing we still have some 'room to move' if, as expected, competition drives such plan prices lower but our objective at the moment is simply retaining our valuable customers - we have no desire to use unlimited plans to attract new customers.
At least that's the theory....and using this approach it allows us to test the validity of those assumptions.The other thing that the current negotiations allow us to do is to
re-look at the lower bandwidth user requirements and see what is possible to do under the new costings that will come in to effect over the next few weeks. The new IP pricing coupled with our more efficient and more widely implemented caching (Queensland and Victoria have been added over the past month) bring new lower costs to every State and Territory but the increasing average customer usage negates much, if not all of those advantages - at least to some degree. Perhaps later in the month we will be able to work out something sensible for 'lower' download users.
I have little doubt that all other ISPs, at least the ones that are left, will continue to re-assess the plans they offer to the market and will continue to attempt to make their offerings more attractive. At our proposed pricing, and dependent on what now happens, Exetel is able to look at the coming months with a little more certainty than we did over February and March....of course, the next few changes will put that in better perspective....particularly whatever it is that Telstra is cooking up. It will be interesting to see what happens over the coming quarter and I feel a little more confident than I have done for a while....though with the Netspace demise it is getting a bit lonely to be an ISP of Exetel's size.