Pacnet CEO believes NBN a waste of money

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 13:14

Business IT - Networking

A submarine cable would also bring more benefit to most Australian consumers than additional internal fibre infrastructure that urban areas don't really need, according to Barney.

"If you take the average (city) street here, you've probably got five or six fibre runs going down it. Do you actually need another fibre run? Probably not. The issue is 100 miles outside the city where he probably has one low copper run on a telephone pole somewhere near him."

On the issue of an upcoming public listing of Pacnet, Barney said it is likely to happen before the end of 2010 but could even be in the first quarter.

"We're Asia's largest owner of submarine cables, owning two thirds of the cables. We're the largest internet backbone in Asia, we're one of the fastest growing companies and it looks like in 2010 we'll be one of the more exciting listed companies," Barney told iTWire.

The Pacnet IPO has yet to be officially announced but Barney said it will be soon and the listing will be on the NASDAQ.

"We have just selected our banks and we're getting ready to move forward."

So why has Pacnet decided to go public?

"We have no debt and we throw up a lot of cash but we think that in order to move from essentially a 20-30% a year growth company to 50-70% we're going to have to raise a bit of capital that will allow us to do some mergers and acquisitions a lot easier than we've done in the past," said Barney.

"Last year we expanded into China and we're expanding into India and we've announced that we're going into Vietnam.

"Another big capital project we've announced is that we're building a cable that will go from Japan all the way to the United States. That will be completed in January and then we're looking at how we can build a cable into India.

"Asia is a big spot. The internet is growing in total users every year at 20% and, if you look at bandwidth consumed, it's growing by more than 40%."