Xtra growth spurt a pleasant surprise

By PETER GRIFFIN

The country's largest internet service provider, Xtra, says its registered subscriber base jumped more than 100,000 in the year to June 30.

The rise was mostly driven by residential users, many of whom fell into the "new-to-net" category.

Despite sluggish growth in the PC market, which usually has some impact on the rate of new connections to the internet, Telecom's Xtra subscriber base jumped 36 per cent to 390,000.

Xtra users dialled up more than 77 million logged-on hours for the year, up from 47 million hours in the previous period.

Xtra consumer general manager Rod Snodgrass estimated that 70 per cent of the new connections came from home users, adding that the extent of growth was a surprise.

"Over the last five or six months we've actually had record growth, which has been quite strange. We've heard about the PC market going into a bit of a decline, but we've been beating records month on month."

Xtra customers spent an average of 25 hours a month online for the year, and usage peaked at just below 30 hours last month, Mr Snodgrass said. Unmetered access packages such as Xtra's Value Pack at $24.95 a month showed the most growth.

Ratings company ACNielsen has estimated that the XtraMSN portal attracted 762,000 unique visitors in July. The average time per month spent at the portal was 55 minutes.

Mr Snodgrass said much of that traffic was attributable to popular Microsoft services such as Hotmail and Messenger. But he believed the high portal usage now gave it serious appeal to advertisers.

"When we're looking at the online advertising market, we're getting up to a number that should be close to a million online hours per month soon. That's a similar story to TV and radio."

He said the growth in registered customers led Xtra to spend "millions of dollars" on technical upgrades to cope with the demand.

Telecom's data revenue for the year to June 30 increased by about 39 per cent to $601 million.

Use of the ADSL Jetstream connection jumped from 4000 to 16,000, providing $22 million in revenue, up from $9 million last year. ISDN revenue grew modestly to $85 million.

Across the Tasman, Telecom's wholly owned subsidiary AAPT contributed revenues to the group of $A71 million ($86.4 million).