John Linton
....but it sure don't look like the telecommunications industry in 2004 any more.(apologies to L Frank Baum)
It's been a difficult week or so for Exetel in many ways. Finalising contracts for the coming twelve months, doing the detailed planning for the premises move and making adjustments to many of our services and plan structures being the obvious contributions to adding time burdens to already very heavily over loaded time schedules for more than a few of Exetel's limited personnel resources. When we first started Exetel we had no clear notions as to what we intended to do other than to re-define, as far as that was ever going to be possible for a tiny start up company, just how good a communications service could be provided at how low an end user cost.
We had no idea of time frame for doing that beyond "two or so years" and no thoughts as to the number of customers we would need to provide services to in order to achieve the volume buying discounts that would be needed by our suppliers beyond we thought it would be "greater than 50,000" (remembering that in late 2003 no ISP had 50,000 ADSL customers except Telstra and, possibly, Optus). So....its now over five years (rather than "two or so") and its close to 100,000 customers (which is definitely "greater than 50,000") and all that I can see that has been achieved is that I've got a lot older (than the elapsed years) and that there is more to do each day than there was five years ago - with a lot larger risks involved.
Oh....the other thing that has happened is that the telecommunications industry has changed beyond all recognition.
It was driven home to me yesterday when, as part of the planning for the premises move, we formally scrapped the idea of installing any form of 'conventional' telephone lines in the new office nor in fact installing any form of 'conventional' PABX (even a VoIP PABX). We currently have 50 ISDN lines connecting our Sydney and Colombo offices via our Mitel PABX installed in the North Sydney office but we plan to now install an Asterisk PABX in one of our Sydney data centres and terminate all customer/prospective customer incoming calls via 1300 numbers.
When we started Exetel we had a 'virtual' office for handling incoming calls and when we rented our first commercial office space some four months later we had 6 ISDN lines and a $A2,500 telephone console. Now, a little over 5 years later we will have an 'infinite' number of inbound/outbound lines (via VoIP) and we will have a more sophisticated 'PABX' than anything we could buy commercially for less than many hundreds of thousand of dollars that we have developed ourselves in software with a couple of redundant servers and some specialised hardware....and we thought nothing of having a 250mbps/250mbps link between the office and our data centre with another 10gbps/10gbps dark fibre link as a back up - both cheaper than our original two 2mbps/2mbps links in April 2004.
We have come a very, very long way in terms of our programming, networking and system skills in a relatively very short time - that's the good part. The bad part is that I would never have dreamed that we would take such a risk and think so little of it - and I'm not exactly a risk averse individual. This risk is on top of the risk we have taken in putting $1.7 million of our own cash into buying commercial property in a downward moving property market so that Exetel can get a lower office cost and have its own small data centre - another thing that five years ago I would have regarded as being the very last and totally undesirable thing to do. While I never thought that I would get much of a return from putting so much time and money into Exetel I certainly had zero plans to be still investing major (for us) amounts of money in it five years later!
However - it is the concept of not only having no 'standard' telephone lines and using a 'home grown' remote "PABX" that provides services to one office in North Sydney and another one in Colombo as well as several individuals scattered around Australia that underlines how much telecommunications has changed, even in Australia, over the past five years. Think about the implications to the 'supply side' of telecommunications services in Australia:
1) No 'business' telephone line rental for a telephone carrier
2) No business telephone call charges for a telephone service provider
3) No PABX hardware purchase cost for an equipment manufacturer
4) No high interest charges for a finance company on PABX leasing
5) No gouging annual maintenance charges from a 'telephone hardware service specialist'
6) No fax lines/fax charges
.....and for Exetel a massive cost saving every month....... (the rewarding upside to such 'bravery')
I wonder what would happen if every tiny/small/small medium/medium sized business did what Exetel plans to do....both in terms of their 'bottom line' and the telephone communications 'landscape' in Australia.