Internode in the market with new ‘high performance’ Internet access service for business

Peter Dinham
Friday, 06 March 2009 07:27

Your IT - Home IT

Just a week after Internode boss, Simon Hackett announced an FTTH service with speeds up to 100mbps and ridiculed the proposed NBN target speeds of 12mbps, the South Australian ISP has launched a new service which it says is designed to deliver high performance, fully symmetrical Internet access to Australian businesses.

Internode announced today that its new service - symmetric high-speed digital subscriber line, or Extreme SHDSL - is now available across the entire Adelaide CBD and that it’s planning to deploy the service in key business areas of other Australian cities. With initial deployment in the Adelaide CBD, Internode says the new service will ultimately be extended to the wider metropolitan area of the city.

According to Internode, it can guarantee speeds from five to 40 megabits per second with SHDSL when delivering both downstream and upstream Internet access.
 
Internode’s product manager, Jim Kellett, said the fully-symmetrical service was aimed at businesses that had outgrown the uplink capacity of their ADSL2+ Internet connection, but found optical fibre ethernet alternatives too expensive.
 
According to Kellett, high-speed two-way Internet access is increasingly important for businesses that adopt next generation applications such as IP telephony, Internet virtual private networks, onsite web services and IP videoconferencing.
 
“With data uplink speeds limited to less than 2.5 Mbps, ADSL2+ services prevent organisations from extracting the full performance and benefit of these applications.”

Kellett said the new SHDSL service was designed for medium-sized businesses, and, he claimed, it would fill a gap in the mid-size market.
 
“Most small businesses find our Extreme ADSL2+ service suits their needs while many corporates choose fibre optic-based Internode ethernet. Extreme SHDSL fills the gap in the mid-size market in terms of performance and value for money.”
Kellett said the new SHDSL service was almost universally available within coverage areas because it is delivered using unbundled local loop, the existing copper access network that was available in most business premises.
 
Internode, in the meantime, reckons it’s a ‘trailblazer’ in delivering broadband services and claims its mission is to ‘redefine the national telecommunications environment’.

Of course, we’ll see about that, and while you’re thinking about it, have a look at the Internode boss’s less than complementary comments last week about the telecommunications environment, and his trenchant criticism of the NBN in iTWire (http://www.itwire.com/content/view/23503/53/).