misi
Growing Little Guru
If you had visited our North Sydney office in the last few days you would
have noticed the large number of boxes that have been delivered to us last week.
These boxes contain the caching servers and switches that we will be
installing in the Sydney PoP in early November.
As an Exetel user you would also be aware of the large amount of maintenance
that we are carrying out on the Sydney PoP and will be continuing over the
next few weeks. Apart from the caching equipment that we have ordered we will
be ordering three more routers and over a dozen new servers as well as an
additional two racks in the Sydney PoP to accommodate all of this new equipment.
Exetel is now approaching ‘four years old’ and our initial network design
has stood us in good stead ever since we installed our first two routers,
four servers and one switch to commence offering DSL services in February 2004.
We now have 15 routers and almost 50 servers spread over our now three PoPs
and the new phase of our expansion of these PoPs will incur costs in excess
of $500,000 over the next 12 months beginning in November 2007. This
represents a doubling of our equipment costs in our PoPs although our buy pricing for
routers and servers has reduced by almost half over that time.
To date the most expensive single piece of equipment we have installed has
been the NetEnforcer which cost around $100,000. The new caching equipment will
cost close to $400,000 when it is fully installed. We are also in the
process of deciding whether or not to enter in to a long term contract with
Southern Cross which would provide us with an STM16 connection from our Sydney PoP
direct to either San Jose or San Francisco to replace the current
international bandwidth we buy from Verizon and Optus. To terminate that 2.4 gbps of
traffic we will need a $100,000 Cisco router in both the USA and our Sydney PoP
which will be on top of the $500,000 expenditure already approved.
Since we first started offering a basic ADSL1 service our small company has
grown very considerably in terms of number of customers and the range of
services we provide to those customers. The complexity of the equipment, software
and operating systems we have needed to deploy to provision, control and bill
those services has grown significantly over the past, almost, four years and
therefore the demands on our, comparatively, small number of personnel has
grown similarly.
That’s one of the major advantages of working for a small but strongly
growing company – each person within such a company has the opportunity of
growing their skills faster, and more diversely, than they would in a larger
company.
We have now reached a size and ‘time of corporate life’ where we need to
actually increase the speed of our development in terms of the complexity of
the services we offer and how they are delivered. This provides opportunities
for everyone within Exetel but it now also means that we have to consider
hiring some people who already have several years experience in the skill areas
we now need.
Shortly we will start advertising for some people who already have held down
positions requiring a lot of knowledge and experience in systems
administration and networking and programming.
As you may know as an Exetel customer we have begun to ‘enhance’ our
basic offerings with new facilities (SMS via email, VoIP via our own switches,
SPAM filtering, P2P filtering) and we have commenced on other enhancements (fax
via email, calling card via VoIP) and we have a ‘string’ of new
enhancement we are in the final stages of investigating including investing in our
own high speed wireless network for business users to replace the current SHDSL
and Ethernet services we buy from Powertel and Optus.
In fact, we are in the process of adding more new functions and facilities to
Exetel over the coming four months than we have done in the past four years.
All of these changes and enhancements have required a very large financial
investment and have, and will, require unbelievably careful implementation
involving many people within our current personnel and some people who are not
with us at the moment.
It’s going to be a very exciting time in the development of Exetel and if
you have excellent system administration or programming or network
implementation skills we would like to hear from you.
If you would like to be part of a very challenging implementation process
please send a resume to:
stevew@exetel.com.au
Big spending spree.
