John Linton While I am childishly counting down the 'number of sleeps' until we leave on our over delayed annual break there seems to be more 'loose ends' than usual to tidy up over the remaining two weeks. Having made a list and checked it more than twice it seems I add more items than I cross off and right now it is significantly longer than it was at the start of August. It seems to me that things are changing in different ways, than in the past, across the Australian communications industry. Doubtless this is caused by the fact that the 'NBN2' is now over four years old and therefore it continues to creep towards some, even if it is ever so tiny, effect on the thinking and therefore the pre-preliminary actions of an increasing number of providers from the largest on down.
The number of NBNCo orders that Exetel has received for trial connections has now ticked over 50% of the total people eligible. A slowly increasing number of those orders have now been provisioned and the first dozen or so have now been connected. A surprisingly large percentage of the trial orders are for 100mbps/40 mbps services and of those we have contacted/have contacted us the service is delivering around 95 mbps down and 32 mbps up with a 10 ms 'ping time'. As the NBNCo network would currently be as under utilised as it's ever going to be those results seem likely to be the maximum achievable in the near term. More subjective feedback is that, unsurprisingly, there is no noticeable speed differences in general internet usage.
With so few people being able to connect to the NBNCo at the moment it would be foolish to extrapolate from the current experiences. What appears to be the case is that the take up of an NBNCo fibre service doesn't seem likely to reach the predicted take up percentage predicted by the federal government until the ADSL alternative is removed and by then it is more than less likely that wireless will have become a much more viable alternative than it is today. However it is noticeable in Telstra's more overt actions that they will make life as difficult as possible for NBNCo to make progress and just how that 'relationship' turns out is still impossible for anyone outside the senior management of Telstra and NBNCo to have any real ideas about. In the mean time companies of Exetel's size need to make very difficult decisions on where we 'place our bets'....which cause many of the loose ends we are currently trying to address.
One of the more difficult 'decisions' we have been mulling over for far too long is where the best interests of our current customers lie in this currently slowly changing scenario that will begin to move more quickly from now onwards. The easy option is to do nothing at all until the future likely scenarios are clearer....and that is always the most tempting attitude to adopt. However the realities of the inevitable changes that have to occur in the immediate future, irrespective of whether or not there is a change of government at the next federal election, make doing nothing a poor (non) decision in these circumstances. Despite the bleatings to the contrary of the self appointed 'defenders of all things internet' the relaity is that the NBNCo is a political issue and there is no commercial reality applying to any of its actions (including pricing) at the moment or for some many years to come.This currently means that is lower cost to provide an NBNCo solution where the service is available than ANY alternate solution - assuming the customer is happy to use VoIP for their wire line phone calls....and why wouldn't any sensible customer do that?
NBNCo was politically brought into being and one of its realities that it could only make even vague sense if it destroyed Telstra - at least as a wire line (fibre) provider of residential services. But because of the ignorance/sheer stupidity of the 'bringer abouters' that objective can almost never eventuate because, if they had bothered to actually understand how Telstra derived its revenues (and a huge amount of its real profits), none of it comes from residential services in regional areas and the revenues/profits from residential services in capital cities has been trending downwards at an increasing rate for as long as anyone cares to read the annual reports. By the time political stupidity gives way to commercial reality a very strange situation will have been brought about. The government will be committed to the provision of 'country' residential fibre services at a huge cost with no possible chance of ever making even a miniscule profit and Telstra (et alia) will continue to offer wireless services that make a very large profit in 'country areas' and will retain all of the current business fibre services in the capital and larger regional cities at the huge profits they currently earn.
How that scenario, if it's true, plays out between right now some theoretical 'reckoning point' over the next five or so years will influence, and in many cases is influencing, almost all decisions made by companies of Exetel's size and the suppliers to Exetel in more and more significant ways.
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