Internet service provider Exetel announced today it had struck a deal worth more than $40 million over two years that will allow it to supply Telstra Ethernet Access to its corporate customers.
The agreement with Telstra Wholesale follows 400 per cent growth in Exetel’s business customers over the last four years, said the ISP’s CEO, Richard Purdy.
“Telstra Wholesale is the ideal partner for Exetel to continue this growth,” Purdy said in a statement. “Our mutual commitment to customer service, their straightforward approach, coupled with Telstra’s unique coverage makes today’s decision a very easy one
The deal makes the ISP the third largest purchaser of Telstra Ethernet Access.
The ISP said that the average bandwidth per Exetel business customer has grown from 20 megabits per second in 2015 to over 67Mbps this year, with the ISP predicting it to be higher than 100Mbps by the end of FY18.
Exetel said it has more than 10,000 business customers.
“Our SME clients are increasingly migrating their operations to cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and Office 365, as well as a multitude of CRM and accounting systems,” Purdy said.
“Using the cloud is much more cost effective for SMEs and provides great reliability and security; it also places greater demand on their connectivity and this deal with Telstra is the solution to that demand.”
Purdy became Exetel’s CEO in 2013, taking the reins from Steve Waddington who had led the independent ISP after its founder, John Linton, passed away in 2012.
In 2014, Purdy marked Exetel’s 10th year of operations by taking the ISP in a new direction, streamlining its offerings and launching mass market advertising, with the company previously having relied almost solely on word of mouth.
In October last year the company began offering services in the UK.