Telcoinabox to upgrade ADSL offerings

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 30 March 2010 12:53

Business IT - Networking

Telecommunications services aggregator, Telcoinabox is to repackage and upgrade its retail ADSL offerings following the signing of new wholesale contract with Telstra.

The deal has extended its three year wholesale agreement with Telstra for 15 months beyond its scheduled December 2010 expiry date and covers 2G mobile services, PSTN and ADSL1 and ADSL2+

As a result, Telcoinabox says it will repackage its DSL product and offer three core speeds 1.5Mbps, 8Mbps and 20Mbps and will upgrade most of its existing customers from lower speeds at no extra cost.

In April last year Telcoinabox extended its current wholesale arrangement with Telstra by signing up as a wholesale customer for ADSL2+ services under a two year $16m contract that replaced one with AAPT.  It also became the first ADSL2+ wholesale customer of Telstra to aggregate all its ADSL traffic into a single aggregation point in Sydney, rather than running multiple aggregation points in capital cities."

Telcoinabox estimates it will generate revenues of $60m from services provided under the contract. CEO Paul Line, told iTWire "We are growing at in excess of 35 percent year on-year and that is forecast to continue into the next financial year and beyond. We have grown the number of end user customers significantly from about 20,000 a year ago to over 30,000."

He said that about 75 percent of customers were SMEs with telecoms spend in the $500-$1500 per month range. "We feel that market is poorly served by the large tier one carriers. We have consistently found they do get the level of service they deserve from the large telcos."

Telcoinabox operates a purely indirect sales model through a mixture of retail service providers and franchisees and Line said the bulk of the growth was coming from service providers. 

He explained: "We have about 65 franchisees and a similar number of wholesale customers. The wholesale customers bring telco experience or knowledge and a customer base that can be telco or non-telco. The franchisees are starting from scratch and generally know nothing about telecoms."

He added: "We are one of the few franchise systems in Australia where you can operate under your own brand."