Current Specials

News from 2009

January

January 1st 2009 2008 – A Very Good Year For Exetel

The last 12 months have been very successful and very eventful with many opportunities taken to improve every aspect of the way Exetel operates. A summary of the major events over the past 12 months is set out below:

Engineering

1. We added a West Australian PoP.
2. We added a South Australian PoP.
3. We added an ACT PoP.
3. We completed the build out of a second Sydney PoP.
4. We completed the first phase of making the 2 Sydney PoPs fully resilient.
5. We completed the first phase of making the inter-State PoPs ‘independent’
6. We completed the second stage of providing P2P caching
7. We increased our customer connectivity bandwidth by 50%.
8. We achieved greater than 99.99% service up time in 2008.

Services

1. We added a Layer 2 HSPA data service
2. We added a Layer 2 Mobile telephone call service + data
3. We added ‘shaped’ options for all ADSL1 and ADSL2 plans
4. We added PAYU ADSL1 and ADSL2 plan options
5. We introduced a VoIP over mobile service
6. We expanded support hours to 8.30 am – 9.30 pm
7. We expanded support days to weekends and public holidays
8. We reduced all wire and mobile telephone call costs

Financial

1. We increased our revenue for each of the twelve months
2. We made a profit each month; double that achieved in 2007
3. We halved our support costs by opening an office in Sri Lanka
4. Our revenue per employee increased by 10%
5. Our customers to employee ratio increased by 12%
6. Our customers to expense dollar ratio increased by 14%
7. We remain borrowing/debt free; all capex funded out of profit
8. All growth was achieved without sales people, advertising or marketing

Changes occurred in every month of 2008 and the rate of change over the past 12 months is planned to increase at a faster rate in 2009.

January 15th 2009 Exetel Activates 1,000th HSPA Customer

Exetel continues to make steady progress in providing HSPA services to an ever wider market demographic with the 1,000th customer going on line today. The geographic ‘spread’ of end user locations continues to widen with an increasing number of customers located in remote rural areas of each of the 5 main land States and the Northern Territory.

Another interesting aspect of the HSPA sign ups since Christmas 2008 has been the percentage of users who already had an ADSL wire line broad band service who are now switching to HSPA – some 15% of total sign ups and rapidly growing.

February

February 10th 2009 Exetel Adds Corporate Sales Function

Since it commenced in business in January 2004 Exetel has never employed ‘sales personnel’. If a customer rang or emailed with a sales question it would be answered by an engineer in either support or provisioning. As the number of these queries grew we added one dedicated person whose only function was to handle prospective customer queries (all actual customers were allocated a corporate support engineer as their primary Exetel contact).

We have now begun to create an ‘out bound’ corporate sales operation and have hired the first four people in what we plan to be a 16 - 28 person operation by the end of 2009. The people we have hired will concentrate on marketing the Exetel SHDSL and, especially, the Exetel Ethernet high speed data services that have proven to be very appealing over the past six months with more than 100 services being ordered by ‘ring in’ customers over that time bringing to over 500 the number of large corporate clients using Exetels data services.

February 22nd 2009 Exetel Staff In Sri Lanka Increase To 20

Exetel opened a office in Colombo, Sri Lanka in mid July 2008 to provide customer support and other services to Exetel Australia customers of all service types offered by Exetel. Since that time the number of employees of the Sri Lankan company has gradually increased as more work has been transferred from Exetel’s Sydney office in North Sydney to Colombo.

Exetel has now successfully transferred all residential data and telephony service support to Colombo and recently completed the transfer of all residential and business user provisioning services. We are now in the process of transferring all residential sales enquiry answering services and have employed a local Sri Lankan national to become General Manager of Exetel in Sri Lanka.

Over the next two months we will complete the transfer of all ‘back office’ when we transfer the ‘bill query resolution’ functions and hire additional programming personnel to speed the development and redevelopment of our automation functions. By mid 2009 we expect to be employing 28 people in Colombo.

March

March 10th 2009 Exetel Buys Its Own Premises

Exetel has bought a 460 sqm whole floor in a North Sydney office building to both reduce its monthly operating costs and to cater for its planned personnel growth in Australia. While Exetel has been, and will continue to, move it’s back office functions from Australia to Sri Lanka we are also adding Australian personnel at a steady rate in Australia and will, if our targets continue to be met, continue to do that throughout this calendar year.

Apart from an immediate reduction in monthly premises costs, despite getting an additional 33% of floor space over the current premises, it will allow us to further reduce our costs by building our own small data centre in the new building and move some of the current racks from one of our Sydney co-locations both for efficiency reasons as well as the cost reduction.

While we are not looking forward to the problems associated with a major move we are excited about this new phase in Exetel’s corporate ‘life’.

March 25th 2009 Exetel ‘Wins’ Place On NSW Government Communications ‘Panel’

After almost 9 months deliberation Exetel has been accepted as suitable supplier of internet and other communications services to NSW Government Departments and associated entities. While places on ‘panel contracts’ provide no guarantees of any business at all, without being endorsed by this periodic tender process it is almost impossible to bid for NSW (in this case) Government business.

This is an important ‘event’ for Exetel as we have significant plans to grow our corporate business and we are now able to sell our full range of communications services to the NSW Government who is the largest buyer of such services in NSW. Over the coming months we will bid for inclusion on all other State ‘panel contracts’ and in 2010 we will also bid for inclusion on the Federal Government supply contracts.

April

April 17th 2009 Exetel Increases Monthly Donations To Fauna/Flora Preservation Projects

Exetel has been donating up to one half of its small profits to various fauna and flora protection/preservation projects around Australia since March 2008. Recently Exetel has added two new projects, both in Western Australia to the programs it supports bringing its monthly donations to $A30,000 per month. These projects are the collection and rehabilitation of injured Black Cockatoos and the attempt at rescuing the Western Ground Parrot from extinction (it is the rarest of Australian parrots with possibly less than 100 individual birds left in small areas of habitat near Albany).

Details of the projects currently being supported by Exetel and its customers can be found here: http://www.exetel.com.au/fauna_feat

April 30th 2009 Exetel Connects 2,500th HSPA Service

Exetel connected its 2,500th HSPA customer earlier this month and will now begin to more heavily 'promote' this liberating broadband opportunity in rural and regional areas of Australia via its network of Agents supporting them with the first advertising Exetel has undertaken in its five year existence.

After six months of delivering and supporting customers across Australia (since September 2008) Exetel is very confident that it can provide a sensibly priced, and well performing, low end ADSL1 replacement service in many areas of Australia where only dial up internet is available. Extensive testing in over 30 'rural' areas in five States has shown that a 'real' peak time service of close to 1 mbps can be sustained and in regional areas close to 2 mbps download speeds are possible.

Exetel's very low pricing of basic plans and zero cost modems/sims on 24 month contracts will allow many regional and rural Australians to access the internet at fast speeds and at costs that are a fraction of satellite or other wireless services.

May

May 15th 2009 Exetel Sri Lanka Reaches Milestone

Exetel Sri Lanka hired its 25th employee today some 10 months after establishing a permanent presence in Colombo. Prior to July 2008 Exetel had, since March 2006 employed qualified engineers who worked from their homes using VPN data and VoIP voice connections linked to the Sydney Exetel call centre data and PABX. In February 2008 Exetel signed a lease on premises in Colombo's CBD and fitted out a call centre there with the intention of moving many of Exetel's back end services from Australia to Colombo.

Exetel began providing services out of the Colombo company in July 2008 gradually increasing the staffing levels each month and completely transferred all Level 1 and Level2 support to Colombo prior to Christmas 2008. Over the last few months all broadband and telephone provisioning has been moved to Sri Lanka and Exetel has begun to build a software development centre with four programmers now in place. Later in 2009 Exetel will move all billing query support to Sri Lanka with a planned staffing level of 33 full time personnel.

Once these functions are fully successful Exetel will offer similar services to companies in New Zealand and the UK and, with that in mind, recently signed an extension of its current lease to add a further 50% of floor space by October 2009.

May 29th 2009 Exetel Moves Into Its Own Premises In Australia

Exetel's owners invested almost $A2 million in buying a 450 sqm floor in a North Sydney business district building in mid April. The purpose of this investment was to reduce the rental costs it was incurring and to provide it's own data centre to allow further cost reductions by, over the coming 12 months, allowing Exetel to move equipment and connectivity currently housed in one of its rented CBD co-location facilities to its own data centre. If everything works out as planned Exetel will eventually reduce its monthly operating costs by some $A15,000 per month over current costs but will have 30% more space.

As part of this move Exetel has moved its PABX facilities (that provide telephone communication between Exetel's offices in Sri Lanka and Sydney to and from its Australian customers to it's preferred Sydney CBD co-location facility. This has allowed Exetel to decommission the 60 'standard' telephone lines it rented in favour of only using VoIP telephony in both its Sydney and Colombo offices which, apart from providing far more facilities will also reduce Exetel's monthly operating costs.

June

June 15th 2009 Exetel's ADSL To SMS Service Sends 50,000 SMS In One Day

Exetel introduced a 'computer keyboard to SMS' service some two years ago which allows an Exetel broad band user (either ADSL or wireless) to use their broadband connection to send single or 'group' SMS. Since its introduction it has become increasingly popular with Exetel's residential and business users and earlier this month Exetel users sent more than 50,000 SMS in a single day for the first time. Many Exetel plans include 30 free SMS per month allowances which provides increasing value for Exetel broadband users as the recent volume per day indicates. After any customer uses up their free SMS allowance of 30 SMS they can continue to send messages at the rate of 8 cents per 160 character message.

June 23rd 2009 Exetel Increases Network Bandwidth By 50%

When Exetel began offering ADSL services to NSW residential users in February 2004 it deployed 20 mbps of 'pure' IP connectivity to service the 'early adopter' customers. This IP bandwidth was then upgraded every 2 weeks or so for the first few months of Exetel's existence and then each month from July 2004 onwards. Over the next two years Exetel added PoPs in each of the mainland States plus the ACT and will commission a PoP in Tasmania in early July to support the 100,000+ users of its various services. As the number of customers who use Exetel's service has increased it has, obviously, been necessary to increase the amount of back haul, network interconnect and IP bandwidth from the original 20 mbps to a single PoP to now well over 4,500 mbps to 7 PoPs (about too become 8).

Taking advantage of the recent reductions in 'pure' IP bandwidth available from the four main suppliers to the Australian marketplaces Exetel has just completed a two week project of upgrading its Australian network from a total of 3,000 mbps of IP bandwidth to close to 4,500 mbps - an upgrade of 50% in “one hit”. This upgrade is to handle the planned growth of Exetel's growing user base over the coming months and was done 'in one hit' to minimise the disruption of moving from one major provider to a different provider and to make other major changes required in further modifying the network topology and incrementing the redundancy required of a network of this size.

July

July 1st 2009 FY2009 Was A Very Good Year For Exetel

Yesterday we completed the first five full years of Exetel's existence, in itself a remarkable achievement given that less than 2% of Australian start up companies survive five years. We have had some extraordinarily difficult times, especially during our first three years and, without being dramatic, there were several periods where our ability to survive at all was not always certain but,, as Nietzsche once remarked – they made us even stronger.

The past twelve months was the best twelve months of our existence in terms of standard financial measurements:

And these results were achieved in a year when the average growth in our Australian communications industry is predicted to average less than 7%. A very good result in what were said to be quite difficult times. Not only did we grow our business for the fifth consecutive year pretty much exactly in line with each of the targets we set for ourselves in June 2008 but along the way we stretched our month on month record revenue performance growth to 64 unbroken consecutive months.

As well as the basic financial numbers we did several other remarkable things:

We did all of these things while slightly improving our already better than world best practice standards of:

In addition to running the most efficient communications company in Australia with the widest set of true communications services at the highest growth rate we also:

I think we can all be very, very proud of what we have achieved individually, as members of our teams and as part of Exetel as a company over the past year.

So the first five years are now in the past – even if only by a few hours at the time you read this.

Whatever we have achieved over the past five years, and many of our achievements are very, very impressive by any standards, has only been building the base that is necessary to actually accomplish the things we started the Exetel business to achieve back in January 2004. It is the next five years that, if we are successful, will be the time that we achieve the goals of our, in many ways quite different, company. The second five years of Exetel's existence will, if we continue to be successful, be a period of even greater change.

We have completed the detailed planning for the coming twelve months and it is based on a much higher growth than we have planned, or achieved in any previous year. This growth is planned to be generated in every part of our service offerings and in every part of our business operations. It is also based on continuous growth in personnel (obviously we need to provide even better support and assistance in the future than we do now irrespective of our ongoing automation programs) in both Australia and Sri Lanka which will in turn continue to provide career development opportunities for all Exetel employees who have career development ambitions.

It's going to be a very exciting period in Exetel's existence.

July 16th 2009 Exetel Activates Tasmanian PoP

Exetel has completed its national network with the activation of a PoP in Hobart. Exetel previously provided ADSL1 services to Tasmanian customer via a 'resale' wholesale arrangement with Optus (who in turn bought ADSL1 wholesale services from Telstra). Exetel has activated the first 'new' Tasmanian ADSL1 users in 18 months and has begun the transfer of its 'old' Tasmanian customers to the new service which it expects to complete by early August 2009. The new Tasmanian PoP will be connected to Exetel's Victorian PoP via BassLink.

Later this year Exetel will begin to offer its highly successful business Ethernet services to business users in Hobart and Launceston via a wholesale agreement with Aurora Energy and, depending on future developments by Optus and/or Vodafone would expect to offer HSPA services in Tasmania before Christmas 2009.

August

August 11th 2009 Exetel Endows Sri Lanka Institute Of Technology

As part of Exetel's commitment to its operations in Sri Lanka Steve Waddington went to Colombo in early August to finalise the funding of 8 'perpetual scholarships for Communication technology undergraduates at the Sri Lanka Institute of Technology. During his visit he attended a ceremony at which the first two students, in the presence of their families and University personnel were presented with their scholarships and a cheque for the endowment was presented to the university.

Under this program Exetel will fund two full academic scholarships each year for four years 'in perpetuity'. As well as providing the scholarships, Exetel will also provide paid internships for the students during their vacations and will offer full time employment on each student's successful graduation – however it not an obligatory aspect of the scholarship for the student to work for Exetel – they are entirely free to take up employment with whatever organization they wish to do so.

August 25th 2009 Exetel Donates $A100,000 To Save A Critically Threatened Parrot

Exetel has been a previous donor of funds to 'The Friends Of The Western Ground Parrot' to pay for remote sensing audio equipment to attempt to locate the precise habitat of the few remaining Western Ground Parrots left in the world that are located in the South West of Western Australia. These last birds, estimated to number less than 100 are now unlikely to survive without assistance – if that is fact now possible at all. Exetel has agreed to assist the local group dedicated to attempting to help save this bird from extinction (together with the Western Australian DCE) by donating a little over $A100,000 over the next ten months to establish a captive breeding program in a last attempt to boost the quickly declining numbers of this important bird.

To see one of the few actual images of this species ever made (and this is via video) please go here:

http://www.exetel.com.au/fauna-western-ground-parrot.php

It is almost too late to save this particular species before it joins so many other unique Australian animals, reptiles, birds and flora in extinction due to uncaring neglect by generations of Australians and their governments. If you are able to donate any amount of money at all to this cause – every little helps.

September

September 15th 2009 Exetel Activates 5,000th HSPA Customer

Exetel continues to make slow, but slowly increasing, progress in providing higher speed broad band services via the Optus 3G mobile network particularly in rural and regional areas of Australia with over 5,000 active users now connected to the network using it as the primary internet source for the household. Optus continues to upgrade the HSPA infrastructure with faster speeds becoming available in progressively more areas and more capacity to established areas constantly being upgraded.

More than 40% of customers of Exetel's HSPA service also use Exetel's VoIP service with an increasing number of users cancelling their wire line telephone service and line once they have established the quality of VoIP telephone call on their specific service. Exetel will continue to put more effort, and money, into promoting the increased use of HSPA in remoter areas of Australia where Optus can provide connections.

September 26th 2009 Exetel Adds Help Desk Support On Public Holidays

Exetel began moving many of its 'back end' processes to Sri Lanka in July 2008 and since that time has continued to add personnel in Colombo to the point where the original planned floor space has been outgrown. Exetel has added a further 35% of operating floor space by taking over an adjacent tenancy and is further expanding the personnel based in Colombo to add more capabilities to its Sri Lankan operations. By early 2010 Exetel is planning to have more personnel in its Colombo office than it does in its Sydney office. One immediate benefit to Exetel's Australian customers is that support, provisioning and sales services will be available on Australian public holidays from October 2008 and support hours on week ends will be extended from February 2010 to 8.30 am to 9.30 pm.

October

October 16th 2009 Ray Thomas Wins "Conservationist Of The Year" Award

This evening Ray Thomas, who conceived and for the past 15 years has run the Regent Honey Eater Project, was awarded Conservationist Of The Year by the Australian Geographic Society at its annual awards dinner in Sydney. For the past two years Exetel has been the major financial supporter of this project and is delighted that this recognition has been given to a man who has made such a difference to the likely survival of a unique Australian bird by getting a whole farming community to recognize the benefits of ecologically sound land management practices to both native fauna and avia as well as to the farm land itself.

More details of Ray's work and its results can be found on the Exetel and Regent Honey Eater web sites here:

http://www.exetel.com.au/fauna-regent-honeyeater.php

http://regenthoneyeater.org.au/index.php

October 28th 2009 Exetel Increases Network Bandwidth To 5 gbps

When Exetel connected its first broadband user to its only PoP (Sydney) in Mid February 2004 it had a grand total of 10 mbps of IP bandwidth available for customer connections to the WWW. Since that time Exetel has upgraded the connectivity it deploys on a monthly, on several occasions twice per month, basis while progressively adding PoPs in all other States and the ACT. Over the past few days Exetel has added additional bandwidth to the three WWW connections it provides to NSW users and those upgrades bring the total bandwidth available to Exetel's users to slightly more than 5 gigabits per second split over 8 PoPs around Australia.

November

November 10th 2009 75th Exetel Employee Commences – Personnel Growth of 50% In 2009

Exetel has always been a highly efficient data communications company that has, since its inception in January 2004 always used highly sophisticated automated systems to keep personnel costs to a minimum and has continually achieved ‘world’s best practice’ levels of revenue dollars to remuneration dollars and revenue dollars to overall operating expense dollars throughout the almost six years of supplying data communications services to Australian residential and business marketplaces.

Earlier this week the 39th Exetel employee (including working directors) commenced in Australia and there are a further 36 employees in Exetel Sri Lanka – these numbers started the year at 28 in Australia and 21 in Sri Lanka. Our growth in personnel this calendar year in Australia has been entirely due to our building a ‘corporate sales and support operation’ (now comprising 14 people in Sydney) with the growth in Sri Lanka coming by adding residential support services.

November 16th 2009 Exetel Customers Send 75,000 SMS Via Computer In One Day

Exetel’s customers sent over 75,000 SMS messages from their PCs and servers yesterday for the first time. Exetel introduced this handy little application some two years ago that allows an Exetel residential or business user to send an SMS to a mobile telephone (or group of nominated mobile telephone numbers) from their PC, laptop or server. Since its introduction this service has been increasingly used by Exetel’s ADSL and HSPA residential customers who reduce their costs of sending SMS (typically between 5 and 8 cents a message) as well as having the convenience of using a computer keyboard to compose the message. An increasing number of businesses now use the Exetel SMS service to send bulk SMS to their different client bases at costs below 5 cents per SMS.

December

December 12th 2009 Exetel Adds 20% More IP Connectivity To International Destinations

Less than 2 months after increasing international bandwidth connectivity to 5 gbps Exetel has added another 1 gbps over the first three weeks of December which will provide a total of 6 gbps for Exetel’s broad band users.

Despite the apparent ‘stagnation’ of the broadband residential marketplaces over the past 12 months the number of customers using Exetel’s residential broadband services has continued to grow and the number of medium and large business customers using Exetel’s large scale Ethernet services has grown rapidly over the past year.

Together with continuing growth in wireless broadband services the increase in the ‘size’ of the Exetel network during 2009 has been over 50% with forward orders already placed to maintain this rate of growth throughout 2010.

December 21st 2009 2010 – Another Record Year For Exetel

Although the December month has not yet ended Exetel has already ‘racked’ up its 71st consecutive record month since it began to offer residential data services in January 2004. Together with the 71st record month Exetel has also had a record year with revenue growing 26% over calendar 2009 and with record numbers of customers using each of Exetel’s 10 data and telephony services.

Although Exetel puts profitability at a very low priority it is an important aspect of being able to remain in business and in our case it is important to allow us to support various Australian endangered species. The profit increased by 28% in 2009 which allowed us to donate almost $A400,000 to the various projects we support around Australia.

2009 has been a very good year for Exetel.