Feature
Issue No. 38 - December/January 07/08
Way too much fun to sell
Internet service provider Internode has hit a number of ‘centuries’ this year according to its energetic founder Simon Hackett, going over $100m in turnover; over 100,000 broadband customers; and a projected 170 ADSL2+ DSLAM sites on its rollout list.
“We’ve seen good traction from innovative services like our ‘Annex M’ ADSL2+ service and we are starting to see our customer base broaden from its ‘tech-saavy’ roots through to more mainstream customers,” Simon says. “This has become clear to us and to our customers with our recent top place in the (national) Choice magazine ISP satisfaction survey released last month.”
Simon holds the present and future in mind.
“We are riding the upward takeup curve in consumer and business ADSL broadband in Australia,” he says. “We were ready for it when that curve began to climb around six years ago and right now we’re right in the highest takeup part of that ‘S curve’ - with expected market saturation in the next three to five years leading to a slowdown in the overall growth rate for the whole industry.
“We balance the business and residential aspects of our customer base over a single national broadband network that we manage ourselves, with international backbone links that we also manage internally and that now extend to the USA and Japan.
“By balancing those two customer bases on a single network, we are able to build and operate it to an excellent standard, once, and deliver the outcomes of that (big) investment to two distinct customer bases.
“This means we can achieve something quite elusive in the ISP industry - high quality at a price that remains affordable.”
Internode’s growth has followed a very simple plan - make the right investments in infrastructure, equipment and staff.
“The growth we’ve seen as a result has been a matter of holding and running fast, during a very high growth...
