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Publicly-listed telco supergroup CommsChoice has won a deal via Aspire Technology Group to implement an SD-WAN solution for local recycled plastic manufacturer Replas.
Aspire Technology Group, a Mornington Peninsula-based IT and telco provider, commissioned CommsChoice to “explore” other options to improve Replas’ network speed, latency and overall performance.
Replas, which has three distributed sites across Victoria, was using Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) with a dedicated IP managed solution including radius connections to provide phone and data services to multiple sites.
However, according to CommsChoice, the MPLS service had problems, a factor that saw Replas engage Aspire Technologies.
“PABX [private automatic branch exchange] failures were really affecting Replas’ staff’s ability to perform their job and the company’s expectations on service delivery was very low,” Aspire Technology Group business development specialist Glenn Phelps said. “In addition to fibre, we looked at SD-WAN [software defined wide area networking].
“Though fibre is traditionally the premium solution, we faced potential networking and IP addressing issues that were basically insurmountable. Because the CommsChoice SD-WAN allows multiple internet links to transit a single static IP address, it made our decision to go with CommsChoice an easy one,” he added.
According to CommsChoice CTO Tristan Plummer, CommsChoice’s SD-WAN offering for SMEs and enterprises uses dynamic multi-path optimisation, meaning the SD-WAN will automatically use the best available path for the traffic.
Phelps said that, with the CommsChoice SD-WAN deployment, Aspire Technology has achieved throughput speeds of over 160Mbps on concatenated 100Mbps links, with the quality of data and voice across this network are as good as a dedicated fibre link.
“It has proven itself invaluable in Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) connections where we have been able to deliver speeds of up to 80Mbps on concatenated 50Mbps FTTN links with 100 per cent uptime,” said Phelps, who had worked with CommsChoice previously.
“We are rolling this technology out to companies who have had to adapt to a distributed remote workforce to cope with the multiple connections to their office resources. SD-WAN provides the benefits of reliability, speed and transparency of the network on single or multiple sites.
“The main benefits other than the gains in speed of this SD-WAN solution is the visibility of the network we have via the Velo Cloud Orchestrator and the alerting system, which allows us to manage the configuration of the network as needed. Working with CommsChoice gives us extra flexibility, because they can support us for configuration changes if need be,” he added.
As reported in August, CommsChoice mounted a turnaround for the year ending 30 June, posting net profit after tax (NPAT) of $2.6 million, a substantial improvement on the net loss of $19.4 million it weathered the year before.
The company’s full year underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) stood at $2.3 million, which is up almost 700 per cent on its FY19 result of just $300,000, and at the top end of market guidance.
Total FY20 revenue, meanwhile, was $19.3 million, which was actually lower than the $21 million it posted in FY19, due mainly to some large one-off revenue items booked in FY19.
CommsChoice Group is the result of the merger of five different telco resellers, including its namesake, CommsChoice, along with Telegate, Telaustralia, Oracle Telecom and Woffle.
Together, the companies mounted a $7.5 million initial public offering (IPO), listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in December 2017.
