The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
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%."
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
