Chairman Don Erskine said company’s half-year profit was up 63 per cent on last year at $722,000, with shareholders to receive a fully franked dividend of seven cents per share.

General manager operations Jim Nielsen said the business, which started in 2000, wanted to be recognised nationwide.

“The goal really has been achieved this year through paying attention to the costs of the business,” he said.

“More important we’ve been expanding the business nationally so that we provide cloud services or virtual private networking to significant numbers of large businesses across Australia.

“We’ve been expanding our base of large corporate customers that we have.

“That’s made a significant contribution to our results this year.”

Bendigo Community Telco is a direct customer of NBN Co, Mr Nielsen said.

“It’s put us in a strong position to connect businesses and others to the NBN,” he said.

“The government’s plans for the rollout in central Bendigo have not been locked into place as of yet.

“But there are significant numbers of communities like Junortoun, Strathfieldsaye and Big Hill that already have NBN through fixed wireless who we’re bringing on as customers.”

Mr Nielsen said the business would add new staff as more people connected to the high speed broadband network.

“Over the next three years everyone in Bendigo will be making decisions about who their NBN provider will be,” he said.

“We’ll have about 50,000 people over three years looking for NBN providers.

“That presents a massive opportunity for us as a local provider. We want to place ourselves as the local specialist here in Bendigo as far as the NBN is concerned.”

The company has undergone a review, and will focus on the NBN and high-end data communications solutions.