John Linton We have had a very strong first seven days to the new financial year which has been good to see and is a tiny positive sign of things to come as the early days of any new financial year are usually 'slow'. One of the interesting indicators of our business progress for the last two years has been the rate of take up of VoIP services which has been a clear indicator of overall service take up for most of the past two years. Our current take up of VoIP has been obviously enhanced by our inclusion of 100 free VoIP calls in our 'Added Value' plans but the interesting figure I am referring to is the number of calls per user made on those plans as well as the 'independent' take up of people adding an Exetel VoIP service to other broad band plans that don't include a VoIP call allowance.
For many experienced broadband users, VoIP is a non-issue - they use VoIP (as I do) without noticing they installed it on their mobile or on their home and business phones a long time ago. The days of endlessly debating VoIP "quality" issues ar VoIP "reliability" or even "what is the best VoIP handset/mobile/ATA/PBX" are dim memories - 'it just works' in the same way a PSTN/ISDN/Mobile call 'just works' and has for a long time. We have been using a VoIP PBX in Exetel's business for over three years and have recently moved to our own, in house developed, Asterisk software PBX which not only works as well as any hardware version but has far more functionality at a fraction of the cost of our 'old' Mitel system.
At the moment more than 80% of our new broadband applications include VoIP capabilities (either included or ordered as an 'add on') and well over 80% of the users who order VoIP included plans use the VoIP service component each month for more than 40 calls per month. This, for us, is a significant increase that has come about over the past 9 - 12 months and the trend continues to 'steepen' each month. I doubt this trend is 'exclusive' to Exetel and I am assuming that any ISP that has a serious VoIP offering is experiencing a similar growth in VoIP usage that is heading towards 100% of broadband users using VoIP as a major 'serious' internet application. From what I can read in the US and EU communications media the trends towards VoIP are similar but not as steep as we, and we assume the rest of Australia, are experiencing.
It is a sobering thought, at least for us, to realise that voice telephony is becoming the most commonly used application used by 'serious' internet subscribers and is probably going to rival email as the most commonly used application for non-gamers and non-downloaders. We have steadily upgraded the Quintum switch we installed three years ago to provide end user (and in house) VoIP services and have recently been looking at adding 'decentralised' VoIP capabilities in to at least Queensland and Victoria either via additional Quintum equipment or some other manufacturers. We have been doing this for a little over twelve months and over that time, presumably because of the GFC, prices of even very large equipment have fallen substantially.
So, right now is a good time to look at buying new communications hardware as US demand has fallen dramatically and EU demand has, if anything, seemed to haveĀ fallen even more. That isn't all good news though as one of the highly innovative companies we were considering (and it is a very, very big move for us to even contemplate) is significantly suffering from the downturn in demand:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124697939752706203.html
which is never a good thing for a buyer's peace of mind. We have been exploring how we could afford to acquire something like their 6300 and were edging towards a price that we could, only just, seriously consider when our main contact obviously became one of the unlucky 5% and we haven't been able to establish a new contact who is anything like as accommodating.
While a Tellabs 6300 sized system isn't, by any means, necessary for what we want to do regarding business user VoIP over the coming 12 months it is something that we would think would be necessary by December of next year and, based on our Quintum experience (which while painless required a lot of new knowledge to be acquired), we would be wise to take a slow general implementation path into what is near enough carrier grade switching equipment that, in many ways, is as sophisticated as anything in that markket space. So we will probably have to let that oportunity go as I doubt we will find another such accommodating contact when things settle down at Tellabs and it looks like they have more than enough issues to deal with to concern themselves with tiny opportunities on the other side of the universe ("Wow, I was thinking of coming to visit but it takes 20 hours flying time to get to you guys!").
However it still means we have to consider what 'engine(s)' we will use to continue to grow the capacities to handle much greater VoIP traffic than we do today and just how to implement a sensible design that will allow a ramp up growth path which we can initially afford and also avoid reaching a point where we will have to throw away whatever we buy to get through that period when we reach the transition point between equipment classes. While I haven't taken the time to explore this in detail over the past twelve months it is now more urgent having 'lost' all the work I've done to date.
We are making sensible progress in building a 'corporate' sales and engineering team and have well over 500 larger corporate customers now. Our aim over the current financial year is to grow our monthly 'uptake' of new corporate customers by over 400% by the end of June next year and sometime between now and then we would need to have put in place a much more sophisticated business VoIP solution than we have today - even though I have yet to see an Australian corporate VoIP user that has anything close to what Exetel itself uses.
So based on today's news 'snippet' - one of our major 'problems' for this new financial year just got a little more problematical.