Member Info for HeadInTheSand

AmitsGotThis, I'm more surprised after your previous comments that you're kicking off at my opinion that to give over any more of my hard-earned to Amit at this stage would be a really bad idea. I seem to remember a few weeks ago you were posting the exact same view.

Yes if CTAG relists, then of course there's a possibility of some recoupment and of course that's better than where we are today. But IMO should I invest additionally at this stage? Absolutely not.

Seriously? It takes all sorts, I guess... but I do particularly agree that to throw more money at Amit would indeed be the result of no brain being present.

AIMO.

I'm hearing that they're shutting down their Irish office.

Hatches being battened down here, boys and anything and everything being done to cut costs and save cash... clearly at the expense of customer service, at the very least.

So, Ami wants you to email in if you're interested in ponying up any more of your hard-earned before the issuance of any prospectus, let alone any firm relisting date, does he? You have to admire his ambition and sheer front, I suppose...

Anyhow, completely separately, a propos of and in relation to precisely nothing at all...

...I just thought I'd paste the following completely random bit of info from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

"An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and one of the most common types of confidence trick. The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, in return for a small up-front payment, which the fraudster requires in order to obtain the large sum. If a victim makes the payment, the fraudster either invents a series of further fees for the victim or simply disappears. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), "An advance fee scheme occurs when the victim pays money to someone in anticipation of receiving something of greater value—such as a loan, contract, investment, or gift—and then receives little or nothing in return."

Also known as a 419 scam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasdaq_First_North

That's the alleged market for relisting on (with MASSIVELY heavy emphasis on the word "alleged").

Presuming that Amit can somehow get this done, existing PIs would be bound to be diluted to Hell and back.

Re the latest update, I did smile with news of the "confirmed" but still anonymous appointment "joining the team".

The team, hmmm? I honestly don't think CTAG's got enough members of staff to be able to field a 5 a side footie team.

Too true, Matt.

Care in the community has a lot to answer for.

Well... if you thought Big Blu's Trustpilot reviews were bad, they're getting even more slammed by their furious customers on social media. Just take a look at any of the numerous comments/replies made on any of their Facebook page posts.

https://www.facebook.com/bigblubroadband/

I've been watching this for a day or two - and even though BBB quickly deletes numerous negative comments, it just can't keep up with the incoming flood of fury and anger.

Surely this can't go on for much longer? I don't know whether they've always been this shockingly appalling or whether their utterly dire customer service is a more recent thing (resulting from over-expansion and big expenditure cuts resulting from paying far too much for acquisitions)...

...but the fact remains that BBB is clearly further infuriating a subscriber base that already can't wait to dump it and move onto an alternative service as fast as they possibly can.

In fact, reading those Facebook comments, if those customers could actually ever get hold of anyone at BBB by phone or by email to cancel their accounts, then their overall customer numbers would be plummeting even faster, by the looks of things. Maybe it's all a cunning plan to retain higher subscriber numbers by making it impossible to cancel?

Really REALLY not good. At all.

ALLEGEDLY...

(So please all instantly take this with a skipload of salt...)

Amit is burbling to some PIs about a relisting in November on Nasdaq First North, which seems to be a smaller Swedish version of AIM. No idea what its regulation is like (hopefully almost non-existent, if it's to suit Amit).

Mind you and again allegedly, while burbling on about this, he was also looking to raise funding from the same PIs, prior to any relist without the aid of a prospectus or a safety net.

No idea if the above is true or not, but my first immediate thoughts? 419.

Make up your own minds....

Let me pose a simple question here?

Which of the following is more likely to be true?

A. That a share that has in the last 32 months dropped from £2.40 levels down to sub £0.10 levels, combined with the company still carrying huge levels of debt even after having to go through s recent D4E swap, combined with the company suddenly announcing 4 months ago that it needs a further $50 to $90m of funding to arrive before end Q3 in order to keep the lights on....

...might just attract less than enthusiastic comments from more than one individual?

Or...

B. That the assertion from someone who's continually been singing the praises of the same share as a great buy-in opportunity over the same exact 32 month period and fall from £2.40+ to sub £0.10 that it's only possible for there to be one person who's wary about his much-beloved share? And that that wariness is in some way fake or groundless?

Answers on a postcard please...

To be fair to WO, although I've disagreed with him several times elsewhere on opinion as to futures, he knows his facts when it comes to history. Not many would remember Tarian, for example.

As for Simon Clifton - who I believe is the Technical Director - I'm not aware that he's recently sold any shares? It was Chris Hunter the Sales Director who cashed in his 2015 share options as soon as they matured, bailing out at £1.20 and banking a c. £41k profit (as per 12th Julyt RNS). Despite being BBB's head sales honcho, he clearly thought that £1.20 was a ceiling price worth bailing out at. One wonders what he knows?

WO, I do agree with you here... there are some notable similarities to previous incarnations of this beast. I remain convinced they've over-expanded and paid much too much in terms of acquisition cost per customer to do so. Why anyone would pay near-on top dollar for residential and small biz satellite broadband customers in Western Europe is completely beyond me - especially since any of those customers will jump ship as soon as literally any other alternative becomes available.

I reckon that BBB has seen this happening and that churn rates have accelerated to gut-clenching levels, causing pressure on revenues and income. Which in itself has led to swingeing OpEx cuts in "non-essential" elements like customer service. Which will only serve to accelerate customer churn even more. And so on... and so on.

Ofcom's recommendation on fulfilling the USO (the 10Mbps minimum) is that it should require no Government funding - or at least the first £3400 (from memory) of any per premises service provision should be financed by the provider.

That's not going to work, of course - because the bigger terrestrial providers aren't going to invest three and a half grand of their own money in getting a 10Mbps service to one or two farflung properties - they'd never get their money back.

So I imagine we'll see a two-step process, much like we have with the existing 2 Mbps+ USC, with funding available for individual remote properties. In fact the existing BDUK Better Broadband Scheme mandates a 10 Mbps+ minimum threshold as what must be achieved for the end-user, so that hits USO criteria already.

HOWEVER, if you read the Ofcom document, satellite broadband is SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDED from being an allowed technology within the USO because of its unavoidable latency and jitter - so satellite can play no part whatosever in the USO.

FWA and 4G (or later, 5G) both can - as of course can FTTP and "fast enough" FTTC-based services.

Tp put some numbers on the size of the two target markets, there's reckoned to now be about 150,000 properties within the UK that can't get access to a minimum 2Mbps broadband service - and a further 1.9 million that can't get access to a minimum 10Mbps broadband service .

BBB certainly has its issues - as I've mentioned.

However, I think it's wrong to slate them for the name change 9although you can slate what they chose if you like, I suppose).

They desperately needed to get the word "satellite" out of their plc name, because that was seemingly ringfencing them to a now out of date and not fit for purpose broadband delivery technology. They've done that. Tick in the box.

They also needed to combine their brands (Europasat and Avonline) into one, to cut down on marketing expense and make it more efficient. No point paying to try to achieve brand recognition across two separate brands doing pretty much exactly the same thing, when one will happily do. makes much more sense, so a tick in that box too.

AIMO.

GCCRa, with as much respect as I can muster for you (which to be fair isn't much), you've been telling everyone what a bargain AVN is since £2.00+ levels - so hopefully not too many have listened to your fevered exhortations and encouragement.

It';s absolutely classic psychology for the fanatical to stick their fingers in their ears, shut their eyes tight and shout "La la la" as loudly as they can, when faced with evidenced counter-opinion that doesn't fit in with the narrative that they themselves are so desperately keen to evangelise.

What's more, clueless zealots will always go straight for trite "ad hominem" personal attacks as per your post and start conjuring the oh so tired and entirely mythical Evil Global Shorting Conspiracy (tm) as the only possible explanation for criticism of any share they've unwisely invested in. That's far easier for them than getting involved in any adult debate, where they might have to rely on scary things like evidence, history, or logic.

I don't think AVN is done for just yet. Despite that, it has a lot of questions still to answer around funding needs that it itself announced (or was compelled to). It also needs (finally) to make some seriously revenue-generating inroads into appropriate geographies - and quickly.

However, you go back to keeping your blinkers on as tight as you can. Just like you've done since £2.00+ SP levels.

(And I'm one of the ones that people should filter? You couldn't make it up...)

WO, I'm aware that Big Blu/SSW/Europasat has never exactly covered itself in glory when it comes to customer service - but they've got a whole lot worse recently. Avonline (which was acqujired by BBB a year or so ago) used to be a bit better, but is now firmly tarred with the same appalling brush (and has disappeared as a stand-alone brand).

Yes, you're right, BBB are merely a reseller and not a sat owner/operator at all - but they are AVN's biggest UK customer by far for general domestic and small business connectivity - and quite possibly in France too.

Where I will disagree with you is on responsibility for contention rates. BBB primarily buys pre-packaged contracts from AVN (and Tooway and SES) and resells them. They are not primarily an NVNO. Therefore, responsibility for managing the network, delivering agreed SLA terms and juggling contention rates lies primarily with those 3 sat owner/operators and not with Big Blu.

So what's clear to me is that none of those operators can manage to deliver an acceptable service that can be sold at today's end-user pricing (which itself is already about 3 times the price of 4G on a "per GB consumed" basis).

Yep agreed MTB, it is at least half about their utterly cr*p customer service - but if you read through the 70 and counting comments, the other half are all about shocking service performance.

Fact remains that there are far FAR better alternatives for 99% of people who can't get an acceptable landline-based broadband service in the UK. I remain totally and ever more strongly convinced that satellite broadband sadly no longer has any place in the general connectivity market in Western Europe.

I've been maintaining for some time now that that satellite-delivered broadband is just not fit for purpose these days in Western Europe except in the most extreme of sitiations, because of the ever-widening availability of other much higher performance and much more cost-effective alternative technologies, such as wireless (FWA) and 4G.

If anyone wanted an element of independent proof of this, just take a look at:-

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/bigblu.co.uk

For info, Big Blu Broadband plc is the new (since July 30th 2018) branding for Satellite Solutions Woirldwide, and includes its erstwhile Europasat and Avonline divisions. Sure, they're not Avanit... but they are AVN's biggest customer by far for domestic and SME connectivity in the UK - way WAY bigger than Bentley Walker in terms of UK presence. What's more, they've not even been going under their new branding for 2 months yet... and yet they're getting absolutely nuked by their own customer base on Trustpilot.

So, for AVN it HAS to be all about far FAR more suitable territories.- sub-Saharan Africa being absolutely key. Forget Western Europe.

BTW, furious, not curious.

I disagree, Chesh. Thing is, how long has BBB been going under its new name? A couple of months? And yet there's 70+ seriously p*ssed off customers who have taken the time and bother to post reviews on one of the better known and most credible review sites (it's not like Trip Adviser).

They hardly did any better when they were Europasat (search the Trustpilot site).

This is all because satellite delivered broadband is absolutely not in any way fit for purpose, except in the most extreme of situations. You'll find hardly any of those in Western Europe, let alone the UK, where about a third of BBB's revenues come from. Satellite broadband is dying at an ever accelerating rate and users are desperate to migrate onto other delivery technologies, such as wireless or 4G.

Combine that with clearly ludicrously shocking customer service levels and I'd say BBB has major issues... all of its own making too. Here's why.

1. BBB sets itself a 100,000 subscriber target, which it then has to hit in order to keep the market happy.

2. BBB couldn't rely on organic growth to achieve this number (quite the reverse - churn rates are horrifically high on satellite broadband in its core geographical markets), so it's forced to acquire and fast.

3. BBB then pays far FAR too much to acquire other satellite broadband customer bases, all of whom are equally fed up with the poor technology and all of whom are just as desperate to churn.

4. Churn and acquisitional expenses drain funds, so big opex cuts have to be made.

5. Customer service takes a nosedive due to newly constrained resources and already upset customers become even more curious and churn rates rise ever faster.

6. BBB is incredibly late to investigate other alternative broadband delivery technologies (like wireless and 4G), so is way WAY behind its direct competitors on this and thus also continues to be massively dependant on revenues generated by a technology that almost all its users loathe and can't wait to dump.

It's currently a perfect storm and I would NOT want to be BBB right now. No wonder the Sales Director cashed his share options.

AIMO.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/bigblu.co.uk

Anyone else thinking that BBB has expanded much too fast via acquisition, has paid much too much for increasing their customer base in order to hit self-imposed total subscriber numbers and has now had to slash infrastructure costs as a result... which has led to what seems to be pretty appalling customer service and satisfaction levels.

Hardly a ringing endorsement and not a good place to find oneself in.

Honestly. I don't know what's so difficult about reading RNSes. So AVN have got their $20 million from Indonesia. Good... that's right and proper. That might just cover the final payment on H4.

Now how about the other $50 to $70 million that the company itself announced that it desperately needed? Not an effing word on an update on that elephant in the room. Not impressed.