News From 2011
January
| January 1st 2011 | Exetel Begins 8th Year Of Operations |
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Exetel began its ‘life’ as a provider of communications services to both residential and business customers exactly 7 years ago today. From that start up operation based in the ‘computer room’ of a residential property with one full time (unpaid) employee Exetel has gradually, but consistently, grown to providing services to over 125,000 end users with a staff of around 110 people (50 in Sydney and 60 in Colombo – Sri Lanka).
With an annual revenue in excess of $A60 million the company remains an innovative provider of a range of data and voice services and an Australia wide network with eleven PoPs in all States and Territories except the Northern Territory which it services from Adelaide. Contracts have been signed to expand Exetel’s delivery network in to Auckland in the first quarter of 2011 with links to Wellington, the UK and the USA before the end of 2011.
2011 promises to be a very challenging year – probably more challenging than the very difficult 2010 year but Exetel is planning to grow a little faster than in 2010 when revenues increased by around 15%.
| January 13th 2011 | Exetel Begins Outbound Sales Expansion In Sri Lanka |
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Exetel has based all of its residential sales activities since it commenced operations in January 2004 on its web site never using ‘live’ sales personnel to look for new customers. Exetel did not even have a dedicated sales telephone enquiry service until late 2008 when it began providing a sales enquiry help desk from its Sri Lankan office. In November 2010 Exetel began the processes for establishing an outbound sales operation in Sri Lanka by selecting two of the most successful inbound sales people to be trained in outbound sales skills. These two people quickly demonstrated their aptitude for this new service and were ‘appointed’ as supervisors with the objective of recruiting and training a 16 person outbound sales force.
There are now six out bound sales personnel and the objective is to build a sales force of 48 people over the coming year with 36 of those people concentrating on small and medium business sales and 12 people devoted to Exetel’s current residential customers and finding new residential customers. At the same time Exetel is building its small and medium business engineering and support services in Sri Lanka with the objective of growing its current four dedicated engineers to twelve by the end of 2011.
February
| February 10th 2011 | Exetel Begins Providing IP Bandwidth To Corporate Users |
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Since it commenced in business Exetel has been a steadily growing buyer of IP bandwidth from some of Australia’s, and now International carriers. With 9 gbps of IP currently deployed and a further 3 gbps on order Exetel has begun offering IP bandwidth to Australias larger corporate users in direct competition to other suppliers of IP bandwidth in Australia.
With a ‘head line rate per mbps’ of $25.00 per mbps Exetel’s pricing for dual pathway IP is both the lowest available from any current provider and is delivered using multiple carriers from redundant points of inter connect. If this new service offering is as successful as the early interest in it indicates then Exetel will increase its total IP capacity to between 16 gbps and 20 gbps by early 2012.
| February 28th 2011 | Exetel Announces Plans To Double Corporate Services Operation |
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Exetel announced today that it had signed off on plans to more than double its corporate services operations in terms of personnel from the current 30 personnel to 72 personnel by early in the third quarter 2012. Currently Exetel is adding over 60 medium/large corporate customers and well over 100 small business users to its network each month.
Exetel is now hiring at a rate of six new ‘corporate’ employees per month, both sales and engineering personnel, and will increase that rate to 10 per month from April through July. Exetel appointed a Director of Sales in Australia on January 1st and will now add the same function in Sri Lanka before the end of March.
March
| March 10th 2011 | Exetel Adds Third IP Route To/From Australia |
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Exetel added 1.25 gbps of IP bandwidth routing through the USA and Northern Asia today via a new arrangement with Japan’s largest Telco – NTT. Exetel now has three diverse paths in and out of Australia and a total of in excess of 9 gbps of IP transit. The other carriers used by Exetel are Optus (in all Australian State capitals and the ACT) and Verizon (in Sydney and Melbourne).
This latest addition to the Exetel Australia wide network is part of an ongoing plan to add triple redundancy in all transit paths between PoP and device locations. Before the end of 2011 Exetel is planning to add PoPs in Auckland, Wellington, Chicago and London.
| March 18th 2011 | Exetel Adds 4th Level Of Redundancy To Melbourne PoPs |
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Coincident with commissioning its second PoP in Melbourne Exetel has added a fourth level of redundancy for Melbourne residential and corporate users. Yesterday a new 500 mbps Sydney to Melbourne link supplied by AAPT was added to the network. This duplicates the Melbourne/Sydney link already in place supplied by NextGen. In addition to the two Sydney/Melbourne links Exetel provides connectivity to both Verizon and Optus IP routing as well as peering to Pipe.
This additional capacity and redundancy is part of the overall plan to provide at least three levels of redundancy in each mainland state of Australia before the end of the current financial year.
April
| April 13th 2011 | Exetel Adds Fifth Sydney PoP |
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As Exetel adds further redundancy and diversity to its Australian network, and especially as it adds more and larger corporate customers, more interconnect locations are required.
Exetel already has POIs in its own offices in North Sydney, Equinix, AAPT and Verizon and has now signed agreements to add Global Switch as its fifth Sydney POI.
This decision was reached partly to accommodate the need to connect to NBNCo and partly to allow the lowest cost of access to the corporate businesses located at this large hosting facility.
| April 28th 2011 | Exetel Turns On Google Caching |
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Exetel today turned on a new caching facility for Exetel residential customers providing caching of Google content directly for the first time.
There is still work to be done to bring this facility fully on line which is planned to be completed over the coming four weeks.
When fully operational this facility will significantly reduce customer transit times for many Google services.
May
| May 18th 2011 | Exetel Turns On IPv6 Compatibility For Large Corporate Customers |
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Although the ability to send and receive data to and from IPv6 addresses will not be required by any user for some unknown time Exetel can now offer this capability to its larger corporate customers having completed interoperability testing with international carriers Verizon and NTT and local data hosting company – PIPE Networks. At this time there is no capability to use either Optus or Telstra for IPv6 transit as neither of those carriers provide the capability.
While offering no really useful functionality today, an increasing number of Exetel’s current and possible future large corporate customers are making the ability to switch IPv6 traffic a mandatory requirement for the future of their large IP connections.
| May 29th 2011 | Exetel Adds 5,000th Optus Mobile Customer In Four Months |
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Exetel previously used the VHA network, since mid 2004, to provide mobile services to its customers before signing with Optus late in 2010 as part of a ‘deeper’ relationship moving forward to provide communications services to residential and business users.
Since the start of 2011 Exetel has now signed over 5,000 new, mostly residential, mobile customers on to the Optus mobile network. Exetel has never put any sort of emphasis on mobile telephone services believing that the various marketplaces were better served by the mobile carriers themselves and their larger resellers.
However as the growth of “bundling” other services with residential ADSL offerings continued to grow it was obvious that Exetel needed to be able to make similar/better offers to its ADSL and other customers providing cross discounting for multiple services.
June
| June 7th 2011 | Exetel Customers Send 2,000,000 Faxes In A Month For First Time |
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Exetel began offering low cost fax services some three years ago that allowed residential and business customers to use their PC or laptop computer to send and receive faxes at much lower rates than ‘conventional’ fax machines – and with far more features than a fax machine could provide.
In May 2011 Exetel customers (both residential and business, sent over 2,000,000 faxes in one month for the first time. The number of faxes sent ranged from slightly over 1,000,000 by our largest corporate customer down to a single page from a residential customer. Irrespective of the size of the user the cost of using this simple computer interface allows any user to send and receive faxes and then to have the ability to manipulate the individual pages of any fax via PDF technology. Costs of sending faxes are more than 50% lower than ‘conventional’ costs, do not need a fax line or fax machine and can be electronically stored and/or printed out for conventional storage.
| June 28th 2011 | Exetel Sets New Record For Business VoIP Sales |
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Exetel has added 102 new business VoIP customers to date in the the month of June. This is a new record for Exetel, by a long way with the highest previous month being just over 50 new customers in a single month). Exetel itself has used VoIP to run all of its telephone services in both its North Sydney and Colombo offices as well as for those of its employees who work from their own homes.
Over 15,000 of Exetel’s ADSL customers use it’s residential VoIP service and the number of business and residential customers using either VoIP (over an ADSL, SHDSL, EOC or fibre service or MoIP via their mobile telephone continue to grow more rapidly each month. A remarkable aspect of the surge in business VoIP sales is that they were generated by recommendations from Exetel’s VoIP customers.
Perhaps 2011 will be the ‘year that VoIP really becomes accepted as the preferred method of making telephone calls?
July
| July 9th 2011 | Exetel Introduces Six Month Free Optus ADSL2 Plans |
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Exetel has released a new set of Optus plans that, as well as having very low cost monthly charges have a zero cost for six of the 12 months of contract. These plans provide months 1,2,3,10,11 and 12 at no cost and have lowered the cost of high speed ADSL service to the most affordable in Australia.
These services are available from over 400 exchanges around Australia and represent the lowest cost Exetel has ever offered for ADSL services to date.
| July 22nd 2011 | Exetel Announces Prices For Plans For NBN Fibre |
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Exetel has been providing fibre services over NBNCo’s infrastructure to trial sites in Tasmania since August of 2010. NBNCo has now extended trial sites to Armidale and Kiama in NSW and Willunga in South Australia.
All NBNCo trial services are at no cost to the ISP partner until September 30th 2011 (both installation and monthly rental) and will run alongside the end user’s current ADSL service. On or before 30th September the individual customer must elect to either continue with the fibre service on a paid basis or advise the wish to have the fibre service rendered inactive and continue with the ‘old’ ADSL service.
Exetel have announced very attractive fibre service pricing starting from $34.50 per month which includes the ability to make telephone calls using a free VoIP DID. By using VoIP over NBNCo fibre the customer could save a further $20.00 to $30.00+ by discontinuing renting their current PSTN telephone line.
August
| August 18th 2011 | Exetel Completes NBN Stage One Trial |
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Over the past four weeks 50 Exetel customers in Armidale and Kiama in NSW have had access to NBN trial services. Early experiences are positive for the majority of trialists with many reporting achieving close to 100% of the theoretical speeds but some not achieving as fast a connection as they could have or were hopeful of getting.
While there have been the sort of minor installation problems expected in any such trial of a new service the overall impression with the end users is one of general satisfaction. These trialists will continue to use the NBN fibre services until the end of August when they will make a decision on whether to turn off their ADSL connection and continue with the NBN fibre connection or revert to using their previous ADSL service.
Current indications are that the majority will opt to continue with their NBN fibre service.
| August 31st 2011 | Exetel Smashes Record For New Corporate Data Orders |
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Over the past two and a half years Exetel has been gradually building a corporate sales and support force providing Ethernet services to medium/medium large corporate users. The number of corporate customers who have elected to use Exetel data services over that time has continued to increase and is now approaching 1,500 separate organizations many of whom have multiple services.
Exetel has sold over 100 services in several months in 2011 and in August a new mile stone was reached when over 150 services were ordered in the month of August for the first time. This is significant because it represents a significant percentage of the total corporate data sales made by all three carrier suppliers of these services and because the number was achieved several months ahead of our planned targets.
Exetel plans to become the largest provider of fibre and EOC business/corporate data services increasing monthly sales to more than 500 services a month by the end of the 2012 calendar year.
September
| September 7th 2011 | Exetel Delivers More Than 9 GbPS Of Data To Customers For The First Time |
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Exetel commenced in providing residential ADSL services to residential users in early February 2004. At that time IP transit was very expensive and Exetel was only able to deploy 10 mbps of IP connectivity in its first days. This quickly ‘doubled’ to 20 gbps before the end of February 2004 and then was added to twice a month for the next seven plus years while the PoPs were increased from one in the CBD to four in Sydney, two in Melbourne and, shortly, two in Brisbane and one each in each of the other States plus the ACT and Auckland.
IP transit is now bought from Optus, Verizon and NT&T and is ‘terminated’ in each of the different Exetel PoPs in the different capital cities. For the first time last night Exetel’s customers downloaded more than 9 gigabits of data simultaneously – which is a very, very long way from our first moment of operation when we had a single link of 10 mbps.
| September 26th 2011 | Exetel Completes Multiple Redundancy For NSW Users |
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Exetel completed the initial 10 gbps ‘ring’ of routers on its Australian network today. When Exetel built the first section of its network in January 2004 (a single location in the Sydney CBD) it was based on ATM (155 mbps) routers, switches and circuits. By July of 2005 Exetel had ‘doubled’ the number of PoPs to two (the second one was also in Sydney) and had begun to use 1 gbps hardware and circuits. Because of various carrier constraints, Exetel continued to use a mixture of ATM and GigE hardware and circuits as it rolled out an Australia wide network only retiring the last old ATM technologies towards the end of 2009 and then almost immediately planning the replacement of the newer GigE boxes and circuits with 10 Gbps boxes and circuits.
It took longer than we expected but we now have the four Sydney PoPs linked on a multi-redundant 10 gbps ‘ring’ that is designed to be totally redundant in the event of Exetel losing either one or two of its Sydney PoPs. This technology is now scheduled for Melbourne and Brisbane before the end of June 2012 after which time we begin a fourth new network design based on a completely different architecture.
October
| October 17th 2011 | Exetel Delivers More Than 10 GbPS Of Data To Customers For The First Time |
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Less than six weeks after reaching the delivery of 9 gbps of data to Exetel customers Exetel delivered 10 gbps of data today for the first time. This rapid growth over such a short period of time is partly due to caching enabling residential customers to download more of their total data more quickly inn peak times but mainly due to the increasingly rapid growth of business customers selecting Exetel as their data supplier.
The record 150 new business customers choosing Exetel in August has been maintained in September and again in October with man more new customers choosing Exetel’s pure IP solutions. Looking at current forecasts this growth will continue at a slghtl slower pace over the coming months.
| October 27th 2011 | Exetel Sponsored Project Delivers Advance In AI Help Desk Technology |
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For the past two years Exetel has sponsored the development of AI technology through paying for a ‘professorship’ plus a full time PhD program at the Sri Lankan Institute of Technology in Colombo. This program has now delivered a check point paper at the IEEE explaining how the base ‘engine works’ and commenting on usefulness in live application to date. The paper can be found here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=6038089
Exetel itself, using part time resources, first started developing an AI based ‘help desk’ in mid 2005 but made little progress over the succeeding years due to being unable to support the project with the required resources. Using Exetel’s own customer support FAQs the researchers at SLIT have been able to significantly enhance Exetel’s “Caliope” AI function which can be found here:
http://calliope.exetel.com.au/query
November
| November 27th 2011 | 2011 Exetel Customers Send More Than 3,000,000 Faxes in A Single Month |
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Exetel began offering a fax service from the user's PC some three years ago having 'pioneered' the service within our own company. Over that time both residential and business customers have gradually increased their use of this service and in November have sent well over 3,000,000 faxes so far.
Not only does controlling the sending and receiving of faxes fro the user's computer provide a range of services not able to be provided by conventional fax machines but the costs are far lower. It was only a relatively short time ago that Exetel customers sent more than 2,000,000 faxes in a month and with the steep uptake of this service since July 2011 it will not be long before the next mile stone is reached.
| November 30th 2011 | Exetel Introduced Lowest Cost ADSL2 Plan |
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Today Exetel released the lowest priced ADSL2 plan available from any provider - $4.50 per month for ten gigabytes of downloads (uploads not charged) when the customer also orders Australia's lowest PSTN telephone line service - $20.00 per month. This plan complements the $9.50 per month plan release in mid November.
These plans are being made available to address than greater than 50% of Exetel's current users who seldom exceed monthly downloads of more than a few gigabytes a month (and on the assumption that there are many users of other ISP's services who fall in to the same category. It also allows Exetel to return to original business basis of providing the lowest cost ADSL and telephone services in Australia.
December
| December 20th 2011 | Exetel Signs Strategic Partnership Agreement With AAPT |
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Earlier this morning (20th December 2011) AAPT's CEO, David Yuile and Exetel's CEO, John Linton, signed a partnership agreement to more aggressively promote the take up of business data services across the AAPT business data exchange network.
The partnership is based on AAPT supporting Exetel to continue to grow its business sales force in Colombo to over 100 sales consultants (from 20 today) plus ancillary personnel by the end of 2012 who will be dedicated to selling and supporting AAPT's business data services.
This is the culmination of twelve months of planning and testing the markets while simultaneously building the systems and processes as well as developing the technical and sales training required to give this partnership the very best chances of success.
AAPT is already a major supplier to Exetel of business services and this partnership is aimed at building additional customers from the current 50 or so per month to over 400 per month by December 2012.
| December 26th 2011 | Exetel Completes 8th Successive Growth Year |
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Exetel will complete its 8th successive record year since entering the telecommunications business in January 2004. Despite the fact that the past three plus years have been exceptionally difficult with Telstra changing its methods of providing services within Australia which in turn has caused an unprecedented number of tiny through very large 'competitors' either exit the business market completely or sell out to another provider. Throughout those years, with one exception, Exetel delivered 96 consecutive months of increasing revenues.
In December 2011 Exetel will complete its highest ever revenue month to end its highest ever revenue year. We will also finish the year with more customers and more employees, in both Australia and in Sri Lanka. As signaled in the previous announcement of a strategic partnership with AAPT, Exetel will enter 2012 with plans to double revenues and employees over the coming 18 months. These plans are based on a major expansion in our small business and medium/large business marketplaces and renewed growth in the residential telecommunications services market places.
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