Spirit Telecom connects Melbourne building with 400Mbps fibre

Spirit Telecom has provided a market update on its business, saying it has connected more than 50 buildings over the first half of calendar 2016, with one seeing speeds of 400Mbps download and 400Mbps upload.

Spirit, which bills itself as a "niche telecommunications carriage service provider" focused on supplying fibre-based broadband and phone services to multi-dwelling units (MDUs), relisted on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) last month.

In the absence of a financial results report, which is not due until September 30, Spirit on Wednesday provided information on the progress of its business.

The addition of 50 extra MDUs represented a 25 percent growth in terms of building numbers, Spirit said, with the telco also having upgraded its NextDC Melbourne and Equinix Sydney datacentre points of presence (PoPs) over that time. It will additionally soon have PoPs in Brisbane's NextDC datacentre.

Its fastest internet service clocked in at speeds of 400Mbps download and 400Mbps upload in the Freshwater Place residential apartment building in Melbourne.

"After the launch of 200/200Mbps in 2015, Spirit has gone one further by launching 400/400Mbps into Freshwater Place, one of Melbourne's premier residential apartment buildings," Spirit said.

"Aside from making Freshwater Place arguably the fastest residential internet building in Australia, Spirit continues to demonstrate its market leading deployment, creating the fastest residential deployment of symmetrical super-fast internet to date."

By comparison, the Australian government's National Broadband Network (NBN), which moved away from a full fibre rollout to a so-called multi-technology mix in 2013, offers speeds of 100Mbps down and 40Mbps up on its fibre-to-the-premises, fibre-to-the-node, and hybrid fibre-coaxial networks, while fixed-wireless users max out at 50Mbps down and 20Mbps up and satellite offers just 25/5Mbps.

Spirit's customer base consists of 34 percent residential, 61 percent commercial, and 5 percent student accommodation buildings.

Over the last six months, it has rolled out fibre-based internet services to Melbourne's Princess, Comedy, and Forum Theatres; hoteliers Punt Hill in Brisbane and Melbourne; and student accommodation group Iglu in Sydney and Melbourne.

It has also provisioned apartment buildings Vogue, involving 500 apartments; Maxx Apartments, consisting of 130 apartments; and Yarra's Edge Towers 2 & 3, involving 280 apartments.

As of June 30, Spirit had a cash balance of AU$2.2 million, with the company having "started a process of seeking a suitable target for acquisition". It has engaged a third party to aid it in finding a complementary business to acquire.