A new "capped" wholesale fee is "set to drive competition of nbn business products", according to Australia's flexible national broadband network builders.
NBN Co has announced "changes to its wholesale pricing model aimed at making its business-grade services more competitive and flexible".
From 1 October, NBN Co says it "will introduce a new spend cap on its high bandwidth business products enabling retail service providers to save on monthly wholesale charges".
The business products are described as being NBN Co's "Traffic Class 2 wholesale product (offered over FttP, FttN and FttB access technologies)" which "supports interactive applications such as video conferencing, converged business collaboration, IPTV or gaming".
{loadposition alex08}The further qualification is that these business products are "delivered as a committed information rate (CIR) with defined latency, jitter and loss characteristics".
We're told that the new pricing model "has been developed to help retail service providers package up plans targeted at medium and enterprise businesses, those with between 20 and 200+ employees, which represent about 11.7% of Australia’s total business market".
NBN Co says it is "designed to support both high download and upload speeds, the products will enable business-grade applications such as multiline voice, high-definition video conferencing and online backup which help businesses increase productivity, lower costs and improve customer service".
On the pricing front, NBN Co says the pricing will "vary based on the amount of bandwidth purchased by retail service providers each month, with NBN Co's higher speed tiers expected to deliver the greatest reduction in overall costs".
The company says it "undertook industry consultation ahead of announcing the new spend cap and confirmed it will replace the NBN Co Business Ethernet (nBE) product, which was scheduled to launch later this year".
Executive general manager of Product, Sales and Marketing for Business at NBN Co, Ben Salmon, said: “NBN Co is well positioned to deliver business-grade services at competitive market prices to unlock further choice and competition for Australian business. Today’s announcement demonstrates our ongoing commitment to adapt and optimise our products and pricing in order to keep up with market trends.
“We’ve taken on board the feedback provided by a number of our retail service providers and have developed a new pricing model to enable those offering high-speed broadband, voice services and after hours care on the NBN Co access network to market their products at a more cost-effective price for their business customers.
“These product offerings are particularly aimed at helping Australian medium and enterprise businesses to harness technologies such as cloud computing, multi-line voice, video conferencing and multimedia rich applications to increase their efficiencies and drive revenue growth.”
As you can expect, the business section of NBN Co's website lets you "learn more about the nbn access network for business as well as what you need to do before connecting to the new network".
NBN Co proudly boasts the access network is "currently available to more than one in two Australians, is scheduled to be three quarters built by mid-next year and complete by 2020."
NBN Co advises you to ask the following questions to ask before connecting your business:
- What business products are offered to replace my existing product?
- How much data/what plans based on wholesale speed tiers do I need?
- Will my existing services be affected?
- How should I prepare for the migration process?
- Will my devices be compatible?
Good luck!