John Linton ....and nothing brings you back to reality faster than experiencing the total shambles that masquerades as Sydney's International Airport....which must be the only airport in the world that can leave a 777 with 400 passengers sitting on the outer rim of the airport for 45 minutes while it tries to find an 'available gate'......I suppose they forgot that this flight lands at the same time 7 days a week 52 weeks of the year....and weren't reminded as they gave the various instructions for it to land over the preceding hour.
It's been a great three weeks of amazing sights, tastes and - most of all - sharing those experiences with another person so completely. Annette and I played the "what are the ten most memorable aspects of the trip" over dinner on the plane home and we pretty much agreed on the majority of them. Faced with the dismissiveness of the Australian customs officials I couldn't help seeing the complete contrasts between the ways Australians go about their jobs and the ever smiling and polite Thais and Sri Lankans in similar positions we had recently experienced - we are not a 'happy' people in so many aspects of our lives and we have so much more than most people in the world. Australia seems to be a place of few smiles.
Anyway we are now home, unpacked and revived and about to re-acquaint ourselves with the day to day operations of a communications company again. One pleasant piece of news was that one of our corporate sales reps signed up a new corporate customer for almost 150 ADSL accounts for their employees which, together with the other residential ADSL sales yesterday, set a record for the most ADSL sales in one day ever made by Exetel. In itself not mind boggling but it's always nice to set new records if you are in a difficult marketplace.
I will start looking at the ADSL plans later today to determine what, if any, possibilities there are for improving the current plans and re-introducing the ADSL1 8mbps/384kbps plans now that Telstra is meant to have removed the 'bottlenecks' that were causing 8 mbps users so much anger up to the time we stopped selling them. We will also see what opportunities there are to sell the Telstra ADSL2 services which we have attempted to do in the past only to run in to so many 'conditions' that were impossible for us to meet that we gave up even trying to reach an agreement. Perhaps we will have more luck this time around.
It's also long past time to make more serious attempts at building our wireless business volumes. I've been looking at the 'movements' in the Australian marketplaces while I've been away as well as trying to get some ideas of where the EU and US carriers are going so that we can make some better informed decisions than we have been able to do in the past. There is little doubt that the growth in wireless broadband is continuing at a rapid pace both via mobile telephony handsets and via chip sets built in to laptops and notebooks and the next ABS figures will be very, very interesting. Having only used wifi and wireless broadband for the past three weeks in three different countries it continues to remain blatantly obvious to me that there are no speed/reliability/usability problems in wireless broadband for business users and for a growing percentage of residential users. How this works out in Australia over the coming twelve months is a fairly important piece of risk taking for more than a few broadband providers in Australia.
So it will be a busy day and I guess by tomorrow the last three weeks will be a rapidly fading memory.
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