John Linton
Well, it's the last month of the year and we are in the final stages of completing the last of eight of the ten 'major' projects we had planned for the calendar year. The year has, as usual, gone by in a flash with the only disappointments from a technical innovation standpoint being the ongoing failure to deploy a wireless based broadband solution via 3G and our failure to find a more cost effective routing solution than Cisco.
The last two projects to be completed are the P2P caching and the launch of the calling card service via retail outlets in the State capital cities.
We commenced live activation of the new P2P caching service late last week and it appears to be going very well in its initial ramp up stage with no-one reporting any problems and many people reporting download increases of up to 1,000%. Good to see and hear. The P2P caching is the second part of a three part program to not only control the impact of P2P traffic on an ISP's network but to improve the speed of delivering P2P based data and, finally, to make enough money from delivering the data at premium speeds to not only eliminate P2P as a negative aspect of operating an ISP but making it a positive contributor.
So far we've successfully achieved Stage 1 and Stage 2 remains looking like being delivered within the near future.
Everything has been done in preparation for the distribution of the first 100,000 Exetel VoIP calling cards except the printing of the posters which is scheduled before the middle of December. Our aim is, via this distribution method, to increase our VoIP traffic minutes to over 5,000,000 a month by March 2008 and to over 10,000,000 a month by August 2008.
This has been an 18 month project that had to start with Exetel installing its own VoIP switches and then gradually building the VoIP traffic to a point where we could compete with established 'mass' voip providers. Our VoIP service (which Exetel uses totally as do I and most other Exetel people on their home phones) is of excellent quality and we are seeing a gradual, but continual, take up of the service by our ADSL customers.
We figured that by increasing the VoIP minutes to levels not achieved by our ISP competitors we could provide not only a toll quality service but we could also deliver it at prices (that made a profit for us) that no competitor could get close to. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 6 - 9 months.
The technical projects already completed earlier in the year, all designed to enhance the value and usability of Exetel's base broadband services were, in case you've forgotten already:
1) Stage One of P2P management - using the Allot 2250 to control P2P traffic (and save $A100,000 a month)
2) Installing the Iron Port Spam and Virus filtering
3) Providing SMS via broadband
4) Providing Fax by broadband
5) Increasing no charge download alowances from 30 gb to 48 gb and expanding the period of use from 8 hours to 12 hours each day
6) Delivering "Naked" ADSL at affordable prices with usable download inclusions
It's been a busy year to date and we still have a lot of loose ends to tie off before we start 2008 - scary thought - less than a month away.