Finn, the guy on the iiNet ads, might be annoying, but the company's BoB has proven to be a smash hit with customers.
Tier two ISP iiNet today revealed it was selling about 4,000 units per month of its BoB combination ADSL router and internet telephony handset since it launched the device in mid-August 2009.
The $209 device — designed as a collaboration between Belkin and iiNet — has sold over 21,000 units to date, iiNet said this morning in documents associated with its financial results. And BoB — which allows iiNet customers to use a single device for all of its ADSL routing, in-house networking and telephony needs — was linking in well with iiNet’s product line.
iiNet chief executive Michael Malone described the handset as a “resounding success”. BoB represented 85 percent of all modem sales by iiNet over the period, and 75 percent of customers who bought one of the devices also bought the company’s Naked DSL offering, which does not require a traditional bundled telephony line. iiNet recently started offering it as a $9.95 monthly subscription plan option, eliminating the up-front hardware cost.
In a wider sense it was a good six months for iiNet to December 31, despite the legal distractions the company faced in its lawsuit with the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, which was settled early this month in the ISP’s favour.
iiNet’s revenue grew 11.3 percent in the period to reach $228.08 million, a figure that was up 11.3 percent on the same six months in 2008. Profit after tax was also up (6.3 percent to $12.13 million) and the company has declared an interim fully franked dividend of 3c.
iiNet revealed it had more than 300,000 subscribers connected to iiNet’s own ADSL network (as opposed to customers using the wholesale infrastructure of other carriers), and iiNet continued to see growth in the period of its Naked DSL product, with subscriber numbers up 30 percent to 86,905.
The company had total internet subscriber services of 799,817, a figure that had grown 5 percent, and it now had a total of 19,100 customers from its Westnet acquisition on its own network.
Malone repeated his message that iiNet would shortly bring television services over the internet (IPTV) to market in the first half of this year (see our previous story: "Defiant iiNet to launch TiVo killer PVR". It already has substantial agreements with content providers for content that can be used over its network, but that does not count towards customers’ download quota. The ISP’s IPTV model was described as an “aggregation model” that will see TV channels delivered over an ADSL broadband connection to a set-top box in loungerooms.
The AFACT case had cost iiNet $3.7 million — however the Federal Court has ordered AFACT to pay iiNet’s court costs. iiNet continues to see decline in use of its dial-up internet services — however at the end of December it still had 56,000 subscribers on dial-up internet.
Delimiter