Mmm...interesting points you make there but when I moved out of my Vumatel connected apartment in January, nobody from Vumatel requested to come over and collect it. I am pretty sure it is still there, left for the new tenant.
But ok, I understand there is a semiconductor shortage and I will give you that.
But as for the ISP hopping, not so much. I understand if you are an ISP on Vumatel/Octotel/Whoever and are tired of ISP hoppers, but with the set up we have, you are the network provider as well the only option as ISP. I cannot hop to another ISP even if I wanted to.
Vumatel's pockets are much deeper than ours. For all we know, they probably have a quarter of a million active ethernet boxes in store rooms with another half a million on order. Remember, Cape Connect is owned by a single mother who cashed in her pension in 2008 to start the company. We are 100% self financed and do not have secret investors.
If we are the only ISP where you are, there's always LTE. But that's not relevant to this, as you're moving.
There are very few locations where we are the "only act in town". The vast majority of our precincts either have been overbuilt, are being being overbuilt, or agents provocateur in the precincts are doing everything in their power for other FNOs to overbuild us.
It's the old story: How do you get a girlfriend or boyfriend? Have one. If you're single, nobody's interested. It's the same with fibre. We identifya green field that nobody else is interested in, invest and build. Within days of the service going like the moaning starts; "I don't want to use Cape Connect. I want to use ABC." People who've never used us, but for some reason kick back at the people who made an investment to bring them fibre.
When our network was still open access, a certain cellular company decided that they would rather move clients who had relocated to any of our precincts to LTE, rather than run a cross connect from them to us in a Teraco meet me room. At the end of the day, that's all it takes for any ISP to provide a service on our network - one little piece of fibre optic cable between two patch panels. In one precinct one of those new residents kicked, screamed and threw tantrums to the point where he was co opted to the HOA with the sole agenda of getting another FNO that has the cellular company as an ISP into the estate. He succeeded, but ironically, of the 320 apartments in the estate, 190 were live when the new "official" FNO launched, 240 are now live clients of ours as of this morning and the other FNO is unable to cover it's layer 2 costs each month and running the site at a gross loss.
If you stop and think about what he did: He was paying more for a capped FTTH service at his previous residence than he would have paid for an uncapped service on our network. He was then moved to a capped LTE solution that would still have cost him more than our uncapped FTTH. Yet, he fought tooth and nail for a FNO to build so that he could pay that FNO more than he would have paid us. Doesn't make sense, does it?
