By MICHAEL FOREMAN
The managing director of Wellington internet service provider Paradise.net has denied an industry rumour that his company is about to be taken over by Telstra Saturn.
"I've heard that, too," said Shane Cole.
"I've been approached by various people over the last six months with a view to taking a stake in Paradise, but they weren't among them."
Paradise had "a very close relationship" with Wellington-based Saturn Communications but this was based on supplying internet services to 7000 Saturn cable subscribers rather than a merger plan.
"They are our biggest customer," Mr Cole said.
The recently announced $1.1 billion cable services joint venture between Telstra New Zealand and Saturn would not affect Paradise - unless Telstra decided to launch its Big Pond internet service in New Zealand.
"That might affect things, I suppose," said Mr Cole.
He would not rule out the possibility of a full or partial sale of Paradise in the future, but believed the company had some growing to do first.
Paradise, which has 31,000 mainly dial-up subscribers, is reporting rapid growth in demand for its high-speed internet services.
While the growth figures are based on small starting numbers, Paradise expects 40 per cent of its customers to be connected by broadband channels within 18 months.
To cope with the increased traffic, Paradise has become the first New Zealand customer for a Cisco Systems 12000 series router, which was supplied by Wellington system integrator Datacraft at a cost of about $200,000.
Broadband connections, which run at 60 times the speed of ordinary dial-up services, created "a vast amount of traffic," Mr Cole said.
"If you've got 30,000 broadband subscribers you are in a very different situation to having 30,000 dial-up users."
According to Datacraft, the new router will accept data traffic from multiple sources, including cable, ADSL and dial-up platforms, and then transmit the data at high speeds across Paradise's system - avoiding bottlenecks.
ISP pulls plug on takeover rumour
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