John Linton As Exetel has continued to grow, and particularly as we have increased the percentage of business customers we provide larger and larger services to we have been expanding our Australian network capabilities at an increasingly faster rate. Time does tend to go by faster than you tend to notice and it has certainly 'flown by' since we installed our first two Cisco 7206's and four IBM X class servers back in late January 2004 into the, then, Powertel data centre in Kent Street with its single 10 mbps (it may have been 20 mbps) ATM IP link. Time flashed by and within a year we had moved away from ATM technology to GiGE connections (a massive leap forward) and had therefore moved on to the next class of GigE 7300 routers as our network work horses - again a massive 'leap forward'. We had also begun to replace the remaining ATM links with I mbps Ethernet links.
Earlier this year we again moved up a 'class' when we began to replace multiple 1 gb routers with single 10 gb routers and switches and have now begun to say goodbye to the 7300s that we have used for so long. We are installing progressively more 10 gb links from our carriers (all except Telstra Wholesale who will not supply that level of connection to us and insist we use 4 x 1 gbps links to connect to them in Sydney (presumably to ensure we pay them the highest possible amount of money and do not achieve the easily obtainable economies that 10 gbps links provide). Then we continue the month on month program of replacing our servers with ever more powerful (and ever more expensive) boxes as well as adding greater redundancy to every aspect of the network hardware and links.The 'final' capex for network development has not yet been fully costed for 2012 but it is likely to be much higher than in any previous year by quite some way even though network hardware pricing has continued to fall in some areas...and that's just the hardware.
We have begun to talk with our carrier suppliers about IP needs for next year and beyond. Over the last few months our IP usage has first grown past 9 gbps and not long after wards reached 10 gbps. The increasingly rapid take up of business services is accounting for much of this growth and our plans for business services are to grow that part of our business even more rapidly over the coming year. We are now planning to double our current IP to 20 gbps over the coming year and, depending on how successful our current plans are, we may need to treble the current IP before too much more time passes. It's a strange 'vision' and one that I have trouble putting in to perspective.
None of that is the 'difficult bit' - except for finding the money to pay for it and make the levels of sales that will justify the expenditures. The really difficult part of such growth is finding the people, internally and externally, that are capable, and want to, be part of that 'transformation' of our current network into one three or four times the size. To date we have been able to recruit really good engineering graduates who have had the potential to grow their abilities as the demands of a rapidly growing and evolving network have required. That is almost certainly still the case but we will need to double our core networking personnel over the coming months and ensure that current personnel and the new personnel we will need to hire have the intellectual abilities, and the knowledge, to take the current network to the next level. A 30 gbps network is going to present significantly more demands than the current 10 gbps network and both bear no resemblance to the 20 mbps 'network' based on two 7206's we began Exetel with getting on for eight years ago.
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