Thursday, April 23. 2009I Don't Know Where We Are, Toto....John Linton ....but it sure don't look like the telecommunications industry in 2004 any more.(apologies to L Frank Baum) It's been a difficult week or so for Exetel in many ways. Finalising contracts for the coming twelve months, doing the detailed planning for the premises move and making adjustments to many of our services and plan structures being the obvious contributions to adding time burdens to already very heavily over loaded time schedules for more than a few of Exetel's limited personnel resources. When we first started Exetel we had no clear notions as to what we intended to do other than to re-define, as far as that was ever going to be possible for a tiny start up company, just how good a communications service could be provided at how low an end user cost. We had no idea of time frame for doing that beyond "two or so years" and no thoughts as to the number of customers we would need to provide services to in order to achieve the volume buying discounts that would be needed by our suppliers beyond we thought it would be "greater than 50,000" (remembering that in late 2003 no ISP had 50,000 ADSL customers except Telstra and, possibly, Optus). So....its now over five years (rather than "two or so") and its close to 100,000 customers (which is definitely "greater than 50,000") and all that I can see that has been achieved is that I've got a lot older (than the elapsed years) and that there is more to do each day than there was five years ago - with a lot larger risks involved. Oh....the other thing that has happened is that the telecommunications industry has changed beyond all recognition. It was driven home to me yesterday when, as part of the planning for the premises move, we formally scrapped the idea of installing any form of 'conventional' telephone lines in the new office nor in fact installing any form of 'conventional' PABX (even a VoIP PABX). We currently have 50 ISDN lines connecting our Sydney and Colombo offices via our Mitel PABX installed in the North Sydney office but we plan to now install an Asterisk PABX in one of our Sydney data centres and terminate all customer/prospective customer incoming calls via 1300 numbers. When we started Exetel we had a 'virtual' office for handling incoming calls and when we rented our first commercial office space some four months later we had 6 ISDN lines and a $A2,500 telephone console. Now, a little over 5 years later we will have an 'infinite' number of inbound/outbound lines (via VoIP) and we will have a more sophisticated 'PABX' than anything we could buy commercially for less than many hundreds of thousand of dollars that we have developed ourselves in software with a couple of redundant servers and some specialised hardware....and we thought nothing of having a 250mbps/250mbps link between the office and our data centre with another 10gbps/10gbps dark fibre link as a back up - both cheaper than our original two 2mbps/2mbps links in April 2004. We have come a very, very long way in terms of our programming, networking and system skills in a relatively very short time - that's the good part. The bad part is that I would never have dreamed that we would take such a risk and think so little of it - and I'm not exactly a risk averse individual. This risk is on top of the risk we have taken in putting $1.7 million of our own cash into buying commercial property in a downward moving property market so that Exetel can get a lower office cost and have its own small data centre - another thing that five years ago I would have regarded as being the very last and totally undesirable thing to do. While I never thought that I would get much of a return from putting so much time and money into Exetel I certainly had zero plans to be still investing major (for us) amounts of money in it five years later! However - it is the concept of not only having no 'standard' telephone lines and using a 'home grown' remote "PABX" that provides services to one office in North Sydney and another one in Colombo as well as several individuals scattered around Australia that underlines how much telecommunications has changed, even in Australia, over the past five years. Think about the implications to the 'supply side' of telecommunications services in Australia: 1) No 'business' telephone line rental for a telephone carrier 2) No business telephone call charges for a telephone service provider 3) No PABX hardware purchase cost for an equipment manufacturer 4) No high interest charges for a finance company on PABX leasing 5) No gouging annual maintenance charges from a 'telephone hardware service specialist' 6) No fax lines/fax charges .....and for Exetel a massive cost saving every month....... (the rewarding upside to such 'bravery') I wonder what would happen if every tiny/small/small medium/medium sized business did what Exetel plans to do....both in terms of their 'bottom line' and the telephone communications 'landscape' in Australia. Trackbacks
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My employer is using VOIP for inbound/outbound. It can be a pain when you have a VSP outage but we have sorted that by using the on busy function of our 1300 number provider.
If the first destination is busy/congested than it forwards to the second VSP and our staff in dials just ring engaged while we down... With a decent provider VOIP is ready for inbound business/sales calls. Problem is people use cheap and nasty VSPs. A decent VOIP + ADSL connection works wonders... Let us all know when Exetel does multiple calls as I'm sure a lot of people out there would enjoy getting rid of their extra Telstra lines and move to VOIP, and use that ADSL line for fail over. Comment (1)
Just make sure the Asterisk box is backed up and you have a hot spare Maybe add HSPA failover too.
Sounds like fun Comment (1)
The problem with committing to the development of VOIP services is, how do you plan to make money when everything is being given away?
Reading your blog has reminded me of how hard it is to sell technology that doesn't automatically crash in price. Comment (1)
If every small business started doing what you are doing in terms of phone lines, I can imagine Telstra and Optus doing something about it. Even if its something akin to Optus' response to the recent overseas VOIP/Mobile calls on their network.
I doubt however that many businesses would follow your example, mostly due to fear. Fear of the unknown, technology etc. Comment (1)
I'd be very interested to know what you're using for hardware for the phone system. What box (and cards etc) for the Asterisk. What handsets did u choose? Etc. Handy for reselling your services.
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I'm not sure whether to thank you or not, but now you've put into my head the idea of not having telephone lines in my new house.
I was definately going to have ethernet going to every room. Maybe now I'll have two ethernet connections into each room and no phone lines. As long as I have the ADSL + HSPA fallover it should be pretty reliable. Thanks.. I think. Clive Comment (1)
Definately install two Ethernet lines (CAT 5E) to each room. You can run an analog phone over them back to a central ATA. The ATA could be something like a Linksys SPA2100, which has two FXS ports which can be controlled from an asterisk server (assuming the FXS capability is the same as the SPA3102, which I have).
Or if you have the ATA in the room, you then just run the Ethernet connection back to the central point. By running two lines, you'll have the flexibility to run analog or digital to each room. I'd like to see some software more stripped down than Asterisk. Since in JL's scenario you dont use analog lines at all, some of the Asterisk functionality is redundant. A system build from the ground up to be purely SIP based might be a little easier to grok than Asterisk. Comment (1)
Interesting, but that 1300 bit alarmed me. Those things are a scourge, and some of us now have collections of old phone directories just to avoid using them. Remember when you could actually ring a bank branch, or the tax office that does your return, or even your favourite pizza shop in another suburb?
They cost more to ring and surely that goes against the Exetel philosophy. Just give me a standard VoIP number please. Comment (1)
Yes, it's the only time I use the ## code on my ATA to override using VOIP. Optus charge 25c for a 1300 no. and Exetel charge 30c for it via VOIP.
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The same is seen outside the enterprise world, in the small business world with DSL & VoIP.
However, most are completely blind. Comment (1)
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