NBN unveils wholesale services for business end users

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 08 November 2011 19:59

Business IT - Networking

NBN Co has announced details of a range of wholesale services designed to be the foundation of retail services to businesses of all sizes: from SMEs to large enterprises.

NBN Co will provide wholesale level speeds of up to 40Mbps at layer 2 in its small business offering and will provide extended support hours and service level agreements. "Many small businesses also operate long hours or on the weekend, so we plan to add extended hours to our service level agreement - from 7am to 9pm seven days a week, with a one hour response time and 12-hour restoration time in metro areas," NBN Co head of product development and industry relations, Jim Hassell, said.

NBN Co plans to release wholesale pricing in a few weeks time and says it will make the additional product and service options available early in the third quarter of next year.

Penny Maher, NBN Co's product manager business services, told an NBN Co Forum in Sydney: "We look forward to releasing our business services product in July of 2012. This will address the needs of the SOHO and small business end user segment and we have prioritised features for small business services that will open up opportunities. Our medium business service will follow about 12 months later and our enterprise ethernet service for the large corporate and enterprise market in mid 2014."

She added: "We are keenly aware that [the SME] segment represents significant growth opportunities'¦During our product design process we have been particularly careful to craft products that address legacy applications, current applications and future applications."

Maher claimed: "Our product suite will allow an RSP to address the continuum of business services from a price sensitive single site SOHO to a large complex multisite enterprise customer that requires high bandwidth and high availability."

The small business services will be available in a range of traffic classes and in a range of bandwidths. James Andis, senior product engineer at NBN Co, told the forum: "NBN Co plans to release later in November a traffic class paper that will describe in detail the objectives behind the various traffic classes. It is critical we get as much feedback as we can."

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