Swiftbroadband
Swiftbroadband, currently Australia's 6th largest ADSL ISP. It is also known as Swiftel, SwiftDSL, and Swift.
History
Antimony Nickel NL
Dating back to the 80s, Swiftel was originally Antimony Nickel NL. In 1986, it changed its name to Roebuck Resources. However, in 2000 the company changed its name again to Swiftel, as this was more appropriate since they had exited the mining industry and had changed their focus to data products.
Swiftel
With an optical fibre network and a data centre in the Perth CBD, in 2003 they sought to further expand their business by introducing residential ADSL.
At the time, the Australian residential ADSL was in its infancy, with companies like Telstra charging A$88 for 3GB of data transfer per month. With this pricing model, many competitors (who actually bought wholesale DSL tails off Telstra) were able to flourish, offering higher allowances and better service quality and customer service. One feature that some of these smaller ISPs offered that Telstra didn't was shaping, or throttling of your connection after you had reached your data limit for that month.
However, in 2003, the ADSL market was not nearly as matured as in other countries. This was because many companies like Internode chose to follow the Telstra pricing model - low data allowances and excess usage rates of over A$100 per gigabyte, or companies like Optus (Telstra's No 1 rival) invoked throttled speeds of 28.8kbps which saw users who were allowed 3GB at 10Mbit speeds to suddenly go down to the 1995 speed of 28.8kbps.
In February 2003, Swiftel launched in Western Australia and New South Wales, with their DSL operations being based in New South Wales.
The more savvy Whirlpool users noticed that Swiftel had excellent value plans, at prices unheard of in Australia.
Merger with people telecom
In mid-2004, Swiftel completed a merger with people telecom, renaming itself as Swiftbroadband - the name it currently trades by. It also entered the residential telephony market with home telephone and mobile telephony products. It has also begun trials on VoIP with full roll-out expected to be in late August, 2004. Plus, a partnership with wireless internet provider Unwired, which combined with VoIP may give customers the opportunity to bypass Telstra altogether, saving money each month on line rental, or lack of.
