Current Specials

About Exetel (1/7/09)

Exetel Pty Ltd began its corporate existence as a technology consulting company in the early 1990s and continued to provide a wide range of technical and management consulting services until December 2003 when it decided to become a service provider of data and telephone communications services.

Exetel established a switching centre in the Sydney CBD and signed a range of resale contracts for services provided by Telstra, Powertel, Optus and Netcomm in January 2004.

Exetel connected its first customer to its ADSL1 services in mid February 2004 and quickly built an ADSL1 customer base throughout NSW due to its low prices and generous download plans which were more attractive than those of the then established providers.

In April 2004 Exetel connected its first SHDSL corporate customer and in June 2004 Exetel began offering Wireless Broadband through an agreement with Unwired – a Sydney based start up that had begun to activate a wireless network across much of Sydney.

Towards the end of 2004 Exetel added wire line telephony services using the Verizon network and mobile services using the Vodafone network. Finally in March 2006 Exetel activated the first customers on its own VoIP switches and thus could offer either a residential or corporate user a full range of data and telephone services all based on the premise of the lowest possible cost available in the Australian market but at a level of reliability equal to the best providers to Australian users.

A key reason that Exetel was able to meet the requirement of offering the lowest possible cost was that all of its promotion, selling, order taking and administration is done on line via its web site. Also much of its customer support was done via FAQ's, a Forum, and AI data base and an on line chat room all integrated in to its web site.

Over the period mid February 2004 to end June 2009 Exetel has grown to a company providing services to over 100,000 customers but only has a staff of less than 50 personnel giving it better than world best practice ratios of revenue and profit dollars to number of personnel and number of customers to number of personnel.

For information about Exetel's progress over the first six years of it's existence please 'click' on one of the links below to select the year:

2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009

Director's 'Blogs'

Aspects Of Managing Exetel - http://johnl.blogs.exetel.com.au/

Engineering At Exetel - http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/

News In 2009

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.