John Linton The week was very productive in a series of minor ways that are important for the future.
We completed the compliance testing for the 'NBN2' (apparently Cisco router's purchased by Exetel will in fact connect to Cisco routers purchased by NBNCo - that's a great relief) and we ordered the equipment, rack space and cross connects to allow us to connect to the 'NBN2' in Armidale (and other NSW locations). While the theoretical commissioning time is 14 days we will be happy enough if the new PoP is operational before the end of June. This will be the fifth Sydney PoP (the others being Verizon, AAPT, Equinix and North Sydney) and are part of the planning to build multiple levels of redundancy into the Exetel network to meet the ever more demanding standards of corporate customers - as well as, in this case, to connect to the 'NBN2'.
As more of our corporate customers are asking about future inter-operabilty for IPv6 Exetel has taken the appropriate steps to provide reassurance to make that happen for any corporate customer that wishes to do so. While there are no companies using IPv6 at the moment Exetel has worked with both NTT and Verizon to provide IPv6 connectivity (neither Telstra nor Optus have made any sort of testing available as yet) and have now made IPv6 available as a standard part of Exetel's corporate services. So another 'first' for Exetel and although it is not something that will help either us or our customers in the near future it is important to some corporates that there is a demonstrable capacity to implement it.
Also over the past week the Google cache started to deliver real data to a gradually increasing number of users - mainly youtube content at this stage as the server cluster continues the process of building up which will take some time but we have allocated 6 gbps to Google on Sunday early morning to boost the process for 12 hours. In theory the Google cache will add something like another 1 gbps of mainly US content for Exetel users before the middle of June.
We spent a fair amount of the week simplifying and increasing the value of residential offerings and have,with the help of two of our carrier suppliers, significantly improved the ADSL and wire line offerings - at least for some segments of the market places we address. There are a few more things we need to do before the end of May but I am, personally, happier with what the offerings now are than I have been for quite a while - probably for well over 18 months. We will now have to see what happens over the next week or so.
So a week of bits and pieces but, overall, every part of our business moved in a positive direction.
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