John Linton …the rush caused, not by Johnny Horton’s “gold”, but by our dawdling an extra day in Lochinver and then an extra day in Perth because we couldn’t tear ourselves away from Scotland’s beauty.
So having used up two days that we should have spent travelling back to London we had to face the fact that we would have to get off the one track roads where we could keep stopping to admire, and take pictures of, the wonders that just keep coming in to view and do some serious motorway miles or our schedule was shot to pieces.
As Annette wanted to again taste the very best fish and chips in Britain we drove the 280 miles from Perth to Whitby in around 6 hours plus a one hour stop at North Berwick to see the Sea Birds Of Scotland remote cameras on the offshore islands a really great use of technology – mounting cameras that can be ‘panned’ both laterally and vertically and ‘zoomed’ to look at nesting puffins and a range of other sea birds that migrate to those islands – unfortunately the Sea Eagle camera was out of use.
The fish and chips were worth going out of our way (the fish has a batter that is more tempura than anything except, well, tempura, and the chips are amazing).
Before leaving Scotland I did some preliminary calling today to the UK contacts I was given in Australia for possible wholesale of HSPA services. It was quite productive in that it established that Exetel could establish a relationship with a wholesale provider in the UK on reasonable terms based on our Australian business volumes and some reasonable volume commitments over the first twelve month period of any agreement.
There’s not a lot more that could be done over the telephone and via the emailed details I had sent before leaving Australia so I will find out some more detail when we get back to London. However the preliminary pricing is a great deal better than has been offered in Australia with similar volume commitments and the pricing at much larger volumes provides an indication of why the pricing on offer in the EU is so attractive.
I’m not sure how to go about marketing an HSPA service in the UK yet as I haven’t determined what market(s) we would aim at in the event that we did decide to invest time and money in the UK while the NBN fiasco plays itself out to some sort of conclusion in Australia. And a timeframe for whatever is decided is established.
Looking at the current UK offers is confusing to say the least for a foreigner to just how services in the UK are sold and supported. The broadband offerings seem to be similar in most respects to the mainstream offerings in Australia in terms of end user pricing.
This surprises me because the wholesale costs of both connectivity and IP are far less than in Australia and I don’t understand why the very competitive providers are charging such high mark ups for basic internet services. I’m not going to find out while I’m ‘on the road’ so I’ll get a clearer picture once I talk to some people in the business and within possible suppliers – clearly, I have overlooked something vital.
Something else I mulled over on our long drive South today (from Perth to Whitby) was how to deal with UK employment issues which I have some knowledge of but nothing like enough to fully understand the costs of ‘labour’ in the UK in terms of the sorts of people a start up company would need. I’ve looked at the UK IT employment web sites and I’ve been given some broad estimates by three ‘employment agencies’. I’ll meet with one of the employment agencies early next week with my ‘shopping list’ and will get a much better idea after that meeting.
Business is beginning to intrude more ‘intrusively’ into our ‘holiday’.