John Linton
I received an email today from a person complaining about an aspect of his dealings with Exetel and part of his peroration, intended disparagingly of course, was a reference to "but what can be expected of a budget ISP?" I have just finished replying to him and, apart from dealing with his specific grievance, I laid out some aspects of providing internet services to end users and asked him to more explicitly explain to me what lead him to use the term"budget" in a disparaging way. As I wrote in my reply to him - Exetel's whole basis of being in business is to offer services at the lowest cost available from any provider in Australia and therefore it is a "budget" ISP in the truest and best sense of that epithet.
Providing an internet service to some tens of thousands of end users is not cheap. Exetel's bills from its suppliers for IP, connectivity, co-location and other services are well in excess of $2 million each month and constantly growing.
When Exetel was created it aspired, and aspires, to be the best ISP in Australia for the people who choose to use our services and we spend every day of operation doing everything possible to meet that aspiration. In most, measurable or 'concrete', ways Exetel meets those aspirations:
1) We deploy more ingress/egress bandwidth per user than peak usage requires.
2) We deploy more connectivity bandwidth per user than peak usage requires.
3) We deploy more routing and server power per user than is required to process their needs.
4) We provide more peak downloads per customer dollar than any other ISP.
5) We provide more off peak time and more off peak downloads than any other ISP.
6) We provide more email addresses and home web space than any other ISP.
7) At 18.5 hours average we restore a 'down' service as fast as the up stream provider can achieve.
8. Our auto, twice daily, telephone call backs on the progress of faults are as good as any in the industry and far better than almost all.
9) Our automatic customer advices from about to expire credit cards, through weekly call charge advices to the auto restore of a blocked service are the best, and fastest, in the industry.
10) The customer time taken to log a service fault 24 x 7 52 is the fastest in the industry.
11) The support/sales telephone call response time at an average of 1 minute and 15 seconds is the fastest in the industry.
12) The email response time of an average of less than 1 hour and 20 minutes from 8 am to 6 pm, 7 days a week is better than any other ISP I have ever been associated with.
The reliability of the network has been around 99.99% since we connected the first ADSL customer.
I would doubt that any other ISP in Australia could equal even 50% of the points set out above.
Budget? Only in terms of the monthly cost of the service as far as I can see but the really interesting thing is that we spend so much of each day working on ways to improve every aspect of the services we deliver to our customers.