John Linton ........... let's hope it is an actual lightening of the darkness that has dominated the last two years.
We corrected the 'error' on the MRTG report that shows total IP used by Exetel customers late last night when total IP used exceeded 8 gbps for the first time and as the limit had been set to 8 gbps the software 'crashed' and re-set to zero until the limit was changed to 10 gbps which is the total now deployed.I can remember back to February 2004 when we connected our first ADSL customer when we had 10 mbps of IP connectivity - a thousand fold increase over just under seven and a half years. How times change. The rate of increase in total IP deployed will continue to increase month on month as it always has to cater for the increasingly rapid growth in our corporate customer base and the new growth in residential ADSL.
The Google cache has now 'fully' populated and is contributing around 800 mbps to total delivery and, more importantly, delivering lower access times for that delivery as it is delivering data from Sydney that used to have to come from the USA. Together with the Akamai and PeerApp cache this means that almost 2 gbps of IP data is now 'locally' sourced cutting 160 ms off the transit times for that data which includes youtube and Microsoft among many other data sources. If only back haul carrier costs could be reduced in the same way. We have to find a way to do that without upsetting our carrier suppliers.
We will finalise our network build out aspirations for the FY2012 calendar year before the end of next week when we also finalise our targets for growth of our various services. When we look back at our FY2011 plan assumptions set at this time last year we can be relatively happy that we will meet almost all of our revenue targets (slightly exceed the aggregate) but profit has taken a real beating for the reasons I have alluded to throughout the year. That was, perhaps, to be expected in this second of 'transition' years for the industry as a whole and us in particular but it wasn't well planned on our behalf. However it could have been much worse if the initiatives we took some two plus years ago hadn't been put in place.
As we progress through this year's planning processes there are occasional 'glimpses' of more optimistic times ahead as the residential ADSL 'picture' becomes clearer following Telstra Retail's 'win back' campaigns and the consequent changes in practice by all other suppliers of communication services to residential market places. Personally, I am not of the opinion that the previous and current Telstra 'campaigns' will end nor do I think that the doubts cast by the 'NBN2' will lessen - quite the reverse. However I seem to see the end of the smaller communications companies attempts to stay competitive with Telstra's more extravagant offerings reaching the point of exhaustion. Not that we take any of that sort of speculation in to consideration when establishing our various targets which are entirely based on our own facts and figures without allowing any 'optimism' affect our own future forecasts.
I am looking forward to the coming year in many different ways and I hope that isn't because the last two years have been so tough I am allowing false optimism to 'keep me going'.
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