Optus outlines enterprise customer wins
The telco said its Optus Business division, along with fibre subsidiary Uecomm and ICT services subsidiary Alphawest had won deals with the following organisations in the quarter from March through June:
- Australian Broadcasting Corporation
- Medicare Australia
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia
- American Express International
- Holden
- CPA Australia
In financial results details sent to the Australian Stock Exchange, Optus reiterated its June statement that its Business division continued to see growth in revenues from services based on the Internet Protocol (IP), with more traditional services in turn declining.
"Optus Business continues to outgrow its competitors," claimed Optus chief executive officer Paul O'Sullivan.
"Business Data and IP revenue increased by 4.9 percent to AU$101 million, with IP growth offsetting declines in traditional data," the statements said. These figures cover the quarter from March through June.
Including revenues from the late 2005 acquisition of ICT services company Alphawest, Optus doubled its ICT and managed services revenue to AU$80 million for the quarter.
Optus also claimed it was growing its market share in the business mobile market, "with customer numbers increasing by 11 percent and revenue in the segment up 2 percent".
Optus has also grown its customer base in the broadband market. The telco is in the midst of rolling out one of Australia's largest ADSL2+ broadband networks, which is planned to eventually reach some 340 telephone exchanges.
"So far, Optus has commissioned 148 exchanges with 30,000 customers provisioned with Optus Direct services on the ULL network," the statements said.
ULL stands for unbundled local loop and refers to services delivered over Telstra's copper network.
"We would like to accelerate our migration rate to bring customers onto the network more quickly," O'Sullivan said in the statement.
"However [Telstra] has set an arbitrary limit of two exchanges per day per state where migrations can occur. We have notified a dispute with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission so we can increase this limit."
Including business and residential services, Optus has 618,000 broadband customers, adding some 54,000 customers in the quarter.
The telco will also soon start to sell wholesale ADSL2+ broadband services to other Internet service providers off the back of its new network.
"We've just turned on our IT capability to provide our DSL services off ULL to wholesale customers," said O'Sullivan in a telephone press conference today.
"That's literally just been taken through what we call business requirements testing, and we've moved on a pilot basis a small number of customers across. But that will start to rollout over the last calendar quarter of this year," the Optus supremo continued.
"From that point onwards we'll be providing a very effective alternative to Telstra for customers that want to sell DSL to the end customer."