COLT on target for €12m revenues


4 Oct 2004

Business communications services player COLT (City of London Telecom) has told siliconrepublic.com that its revenues in the Irish marketplace are set to double from €6m last year to €12m by the end of this year.

The company added that it is examining offering managed services to Irish small businesses and is preparing an SME/corporate voice-over IP offering by the end of this year as well as a managed IT security service.

The news follows the introduction last week by COLT of an end-to-end international Ethernet service over SDH called LanLink that provides fast point-to-point connectivity between businesses in Dublin and any of COLT’s 32 European city locations.

COLT’s local managing director Gary Keogh told siliconrepublic.com that the company was selected during the year to provide such a service for the Department of Foreign Affairs in order to keep it seamlessly in touch with the department’s Brussels office during the Irish EU presidency.

Gartner predicted that by 2005 more than 30pc of high-speed telecoms wide area network services would be based on Ethernet.

Keogh also revealed that COLT, which employs 30 people in Dublin, is examining offering its business communications services to the regions in tune with the opening of the Government’s various metropolitan area networks (MANs) around the country by managed services entity E-Net.

However, Keogh warned that the prohibitive initial costs of using the MANs and associated costs of co-location are preventing COLT from establishing services as quickly as he would like. “I would hope that the new Communications Minister Noel Dempsey TD does something to reduce the present prices for access to the MANs. If they are meant to aggregate demand by other telcos to enter a regional base the prices will need to come down and I believe they eventually will.”

While Keogh would not reveal the cost of accessing a MAN, he indicated that access to a fibre link connecting Dublin and Cork would cost €100k per annum and access to a co-location facility would cost €15,000 a year. “Until demand is sufficient for our services in the regions, the present price points prevent us from offering our services in Cork and Limerick.”

Celebrating the launch of COLT’s new LanLink product were, from left, its Irish MD Gary Keogh and Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern TD

By John Kennedy