Macquarie Telecom swoops on QLD, WA SMBs with ADSL2+

Macquarie Telecom has switched on 250 ADSL2+ exchanges across Australia to target boom-towns in Queensland and Western Australia that have lured an influx of SME and large enterprise businesses.

About 100 exchanges have been opened in the two states, a move which will shake up competitors in the telecommunications and data hosting industries vying for lucrative contracts with the new enterprises.

Existing Macquarie Telecom customers on lower-grade broadband connections will get a free bandwidth boost from the new exchanges and additional network flexibility, as links are forged to higher capacity sites.

The company launched its revamped network monitoring portal, InView, which allows customers to monitor network traffic volumes, server status and utilisation, and performance graphs and reports.

The Web dashboard is the product of a 12 month internal ground-up rebuild of the initial version released in 2000.

Macquarie Telecom general manager for intelligent solutions Glen Noble said InView bares resemblance to the former version in name only.

"It is one portal that allows CIOs, finance managers, administrators and technical people to see everything across their data, voice, mobile and hosted service," Noble said.

"Customers can use single sign on to customise their dashboards to see what areas they need.

"The stand out for InView is the alerting, because you can set thresholds and avoid [capacity overloads]."

Product development group executive Chris Greig said the dashboards will replace in-house network monitoring tools, which particularly benefit mid-size enterprises.

The company also launched its MacquarieView dashboard, which integrates with InView to provide additional network monitoring and financial functionality.

Alerts can be sent to any Web-enabled device to notify customers of faults and network capacity levels. Managers can use the dashboard to manage orders and pay bills for all Macquarie services.

Noble said the company may include functionality in the dashboards to allow customers to monitor their own networks and systems, following customer feedback.

The dashboards can be purchased as an entry level package, with status and utilisation graphs and personalised dashboards, or as the premium suite with full reporting, status updates, alerts and customisable thresholds.