John Linton For three and a half years or so Exetel grew its business month on month with all facilities and services located in a single data centre in the Sydeney CBD. This was, and is, easily the most operationally and cost efficient method of providing services and one we only began to move away from in mid 2007 when we commissioned a Melbourne PoP closely followed by a Brisbane PoP. Our reasons for doing this have, already, been overtaken by circumstances and if I had to make the same decision today I, almost certainly, wouldn't do the same thing.
Towards the end of 2007 we also made a decision to begin building out a second PoP in Sydney. We had already activated a second PoP which we used entirely to connect our wire line and VoIP services to Verizon and therefore, understandably, we used Verizon's data centre services for this purpose. Our decision to 'build out' the Verizon based services was really forced on us by another carrier's 'policy' and we probably wouldn't have decided to build out a second Sydney PoP if it hadn't been for that circumstance of any size at this time and maybe not ever - but that's life.
We have money in the business plan to establish a Perth based PoP and have considered whether or not we should establish other PoPs in, perhaps, Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart (but have made absolutely no plans/money provisions to do this). Our basis for establishing PoPs outside Sydney were driven partially by the future savings we could achieve (once enough customers were connected) for residential services but mainly because we needed to more rapidly increase the percentage of business customers we derived our revenues from and to do that we needed more 'local' facilities.
The recent marketing activities of Telstra BigPond have made the wisdom of spending money on resources to deliver ADSL services to residential customers very dubious and the likely financial benefit of that decision must now be in some considerable doubt. However the planned growth in business services was always the major 'driver' for the additional PoP decisions and all the recent Telstra BigPond events have made obvious is that we need to accelerate our plans and redouble our efforts to make use of the new PoPs for business users.
One of the key business reasons for PoPs in other cities was to make it easier to 'terminate' wire less business (the need for line of sight antennae) and telephone services (the need for locally terminated number ranges) and we are making some, slow, progress towards putting those services in place.
Another reason for not only increasing the capabilities of the new Melbourne and Brisbane PoPs but of more quickly establishing other PoPs is the more we look at providing data services over 3G/4G the more aware we are becoming of the various pricing issues of 'geography' that we may be confronted with from various different carriers which was not something that had occurred to me in 2008 as it may have done in the late 1990s. The provision of IPTV and other streaming video services also makes it essential for more 'local' PoPs.
The stronger than expected, by us, growth in ADSL2 is also indicating that it may be better to terminate that traffic in the State in which it originates rather than using the various carrier's own networks to transit the data to one or other of the Sydney PoPs and we'll need to better understand just where that growth is and whether the trend is going to continue by the end of this quarter. From what I'm now seeing this trend is very hard to understand and I really have no idea of what is happening and, worse, why it's happening.
My current view is that, despite the very negative effects of Telstra BigPond's "new" residential "marketing" we will go ahead with the Perth PoP in the not too distant future and it looks more likely that we'll add further PoPs sooner rather than later though where they'll be is by no means certain with NSW regional locations presenting some previously unconsidered opportunities.
Sometimes I wish there were less difficulties and far less decisions to make in running a small business.