About Exetel
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, AAPT, 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. By February 2005 Exetel had extended its customer coverage to all Australian mainland States and further extended coverage to Tasmania in mid 2008.
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. Since October 2008 Exetel has offered wireless broadband using the Optus 3G network.
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 for residential customers was that all of its promotion, selling, order taking and administration was, for over five years, done on line via its web site. Also much of its customer support for simple issues 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 the end of December 2011 Exetel has grown to a company providing services to over 125,000 customers but only has a staff of around 150 personnel (50 in Australia and 100 in Sri Lanka) 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 and several other important measurement categories.
For information about Exetel's progress over the first eight years of its existence please 'click' on one of the links below to select the year:
2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | Earlier in 2011
Director's 'Blogs'
Aspects Of Managing Exetel - http://johnl.blogs.exetel.com.au/
Engineering At Exetel - http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/
News In 2011
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.
