The “prestigious” Freshwater Place complex of 530 apartments, in Melbourne’s riverside Southbank precinct, has been upgraded to the faster network, 240 of which were already Spirit customers with access to plans providing lesser speeds of up to 100/100Mbps.

“Freshwater Place was one of our first residential buildings to have our Ultra-Fast ‘UFI’ product, back in 2013. They were at the forefront then and they have now been upgraded to enable us to launch a 400/400 product, leapfrogging the market yet again,” says Spirit managing director, Geoff Neate.

“Since we first enabled Freshwater we have seen the markets’ appetite for superfast Internet surge, with the growth of phones and tablets streaming music video and catch-up TV to multiple devices at any given time.

Neate says trends around the world show that people want more from their Internet.

“For example, countries like Japan offer speeds up to 2Gbps. In Australia, whilst we are not there yet, at Spirit we are proud to be taking a step forward, in providing faster speeds to Australians.”

The Freshwater Place deployment, announced on Wednesday, coincided with the ASX-listed Spirit Telecom’s release of its market update reporting that over 50 commercial and residential buildings in Australia have been added to its network in the first six months to the end of June this year – a growth of 25% in building numbers.

The Melbourne-based Spirit backdoor listed on 27 June with a market cap of $16.7 million after a $2.6 million capital-raising and reverse takeover of Arunta Resources.

Neate says the company has increased marketing activity as a result of the funds raised from the ASX listing, by increasing the marketing expenditure to the residential market and also investing in the dealer/partner channel, by the appointment of a number of dealers.

Spirit acquired Melbourne-based ISP Voxcom in 2012 followed by the acquisition of My Telecom in mid-2015, and Neate says the migration and consolidation to its network of My Telecom is nearing completion.

Spirit has flagged that it is on the lookout for further acquisitions.