According to Campbell Sallabank, general manager of Primus Telecom Internet Division, Hotkey Internet Services acquired Melbourne-based UseOz after the company went into administration last month, with the intention of farming its 7,000 strong subscriber base out to Hotkey franchisees throughout the Melbourne metropolitan area. In a similar vein the acquisition of the Standard.net user base from Fairfax will see 2,000 subscribers added to a Hotkey franchisee in regional Victoria, whereas Blue Mountains Internet has become a Hotkey franchisee bringing 500 subscribers into the fold.
Sallabank said Primus intends to continue with its strategy of growth through acquisition, and looks forward to announcing monthly acquisitions on a "systematic and opportunistic basis" throughout 2003.
"Our strategy moving forward is for Hotkey to mop up a lot of the smaller and medium sized players, while iPrimus will pick up one or two of the more significant ISPs, with a subscriber base upwards of twenty-four thousand," Sallabank said. "If there are any small or struggling ISPs out there that are interested in coming under the Hotkey umbrella, we have a good franchise system that allows them to do that."
Sallabank said Primus intended become Australia's second largest ISP within the next twelve months in both the dial-up and broadband market place, deriving the bulk of their growth through similar acquisitions. This latest round of acquisitions will expand the Hotkey subscriber base to over 75,000.
Perhaps it is this expansion that has caused the recent fall in service standards. For exmaple, slower connection speeds over my dialup line, more difficult connections, and an inability to access slower responding sites here and overseas. Is Primus following in the footstep sof many US ISPs and building up its customer base before installing the capacity to handle the increased throughput?