John Linton
We had our monthly board meeting yesterday which we usually hold over a lunch or dinner at one of the many nice places to eat in Sydney - the only benefit there is in being a director of Exetel. These meetings are usually very pleasant with even difficult issues and situations being discussed and dealt with without casting too much gloom or for very long. Over the years we've only had three situations that could be described as serious which is not too bad over a four year period.
Steve made a comment during the engineering report/discussion that didn't have the impact on me at the time as it did when I was dealing with some other issuers earlier this morning. The comment that now 'gives me pause' was "there will be more changes made to the Exetel core network over the next six weeks than has occurred in total over the past 18 months".
Exetel has continued to develop/change since we first 'went to market' almost four years ago as any growing company will obviously do. However, Steve's comment made me consider what the past few board meetings had authorised in terms of additional capital expenditure and new infrastructures and it all adds up to quite massive changes in the key elements of the ways we deliver services.
We activated new PoPs in Queensland and Victoria in the middle of this year relatively painlessly and without any significant changes to the way we delivered services in Victoria and Queensland other than obtaining some financial efficiencies for Exetel and shortening some transit paths for users in those States. Although there was significant cost involved it wasn't anything like what will now begin to happen and continue for the next 6 weeks or so.
We had already begun to build out a second Sydney CBD PoP as it seemed to make sense to have a PoP in the Verizon data centre as much of our current wireline and VoIP connectivity is via Verizon. The new changes and developments planned by Steve mean that the second PoP will become also used for data termination and switching as we will begin to terminate carrier data carrier interfaces in Verizon to duplicate the ones we currently have in the Powertel datacentre.
The first of the major changes will be the duplication of the Telstra Wholesale GigE circuit that's used to terminate all Exetel's NSW ADSL1 customers. This is currenty done via ne GigE circuit to Powertel's data centre with 900 mbps of VLANs. Some time 'soon' a second GigE from Telstra will be terminated in the Verizon data centre and we will split the NSW ADSL1 traffic using 500 mbps VLANs on each bearer. This in turn means adding and redploying half of the LNS routers used for these services as well as adding multile GigE cross connects between the two data centres.
We also will now deploy the P2P caching engine and storage, probably some time early next week, which is another major change to how the core network is configured with also a need to add and re-cable key routers and switches.
Almost simultaneously we need to upgrade our VoIP switches and double the number of PRIs used for VoIP traffic in December and then double the PRIs again in two steps in January and early February and at the same time ad new routers and switches to the new Melbourne and Brisbane PoPs as well as activating a PoP in Perth at abut the same time.
While we're doing this we also have to provision and deploy new ADSL2 services using "naked" ULL and we are launching a calling card product sold via retail outlets in three capital cities in December.
A frightening amount of change for a small company but almost certainly only the start of what wil be required in 2008 if we go ahead with a dslam or wireless 'roll out.
Then there's today's election and the uncertainties that a change of governent will introduce in to the communications service business (and all of the other aspects of business of course).
If you read this and vote in Australia please don't vote against the current government - I don't think I can handle the concerns that would bring.