There’s no certainty the costs to consumers of buying a broadband service delivered over the National Broadband Network will go down by mid-year. This is despite NBN Co’s announcement today that the wholesale prices it charges Internet service providers have been revamped to encourage retailers to differentiate their offerings and give consumers a wider choice of broadband plans.
NBN Co is moving to a a new discount model for its Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC) charge – the fee it imposes on RSPs per unit of bandwidth they buy on the national broadband network.
The new model will take effect from 1 June; it calculates the discount based on individual retailer averages, as opposed to an industry average.
And, it automatically reduces the price of CVC as the average amount of CVC per end user increases.
{loadposition peter}There has been widespread industry concern over advantages on pricing that Telstra is seen to have as the biggest buyer of NBN services with 51% of the market, and now, concerns whether the dominant telco will get bigger discounts than smaller retailers when the new pricing model takes effect.
The new discount model is based on the network capacity that an individual retail provider buys from NBN to provide to consumers, meaning if higher bandwidth is required, it will push up the CVC price.
NBN Co introduced the industry average discount model for CVC last year, with the effective unit price per Mbps dropping from $17.50 to $15.75 in June 2015, followed by a further reduction to $15.25 in December.
"This is not a volume discount. We don’t give volume discounts for that reason," NBN Co’s executive general manager of pricing, Sarah Palmer, said about today's announcement.
"What this is, is your capacity divided by number of end users. As a result, big guys get some capacity and scale efficiencies; maybe a small guy after a particular market segment could get a higher dimensioning capacity."
Palmer claimed that as usage of the NBN grew, there would be a bigger range of plans and more "cost certainty" and flexibibilty for retailers.
"We would like consumers to see a bigger and greater range of plans," she said.
NBN Co chief customer officer John Simon said changes to the pricing model were intended to deliver a number of benefits, “including greater forward price certainty to retail service providers (RSPs), allowing them to better manage their cost base, and support growth in usage on the NBN network”.
“It will also provide further scope for retailers to differentiate their offerings, which, in turn, will promote competition and assist consumers in accessing a wider choice of broadband plans."
He said the new model was the next step in the evolution of the dimension based discount (DBD) pricing mechanism, which was introduced last June on an industry-average basis. "It follows an extensive consultation period with NBN’s customers, the retailer service providers".
“Our aim is to achieve better outcomes for end users, RSPs and NBN Co by providing a more direct link between an individual retailer’s dimensioning and unit price.”
And, according to Simon, feedback received during the consultation period with industry was “broadly supportive of the new approach”.
“We have worked closely with industry in order to make sure we are delivering a range of competitive broadband services for all Australians. Today’s announcement is another step in helping us create value and competition in the market.
“We will continue to review our pricing structure to ensure it supports uptake and usage of the NBN network.”
The new model applies the discount on a monthly basis across all technologies, except satellite.