The decision has been made to help its internet and phone providers meet the demands of medium, enterprise and government businesses migrate to NBN’s broadband access network.
Commenting on the news, John Simon, NBN’s chief customer officer, said: “We’ve focused our efforts on developing wholesale products and services for residential and small to medium sized businesses during the early stage of the roll-out. As we increasingly move into metro areas we are accelerating the development of our wholesale product suite to meet the needs of enterprise and government businesses.”
The range of initiatives include:
Enterprise Ethernet product which accelerated launch of a wholesale direct fibre broadband product that provides access to enterprise-grade high bandwidth. The product has been designed to reach speeds of 1Gbps and the first phase of the industry trial is due to begin this month with a market release scheduled for the end of 2018.
“As Australia continues to move to a service based economy, we want to enable innovation and help support large and enterprise businesses to take advantage of high-bandwidth applications to increase their productivity and reduce their bottom line," added Simon.
There’s also the dedicated case management which creates enterprise engagement teams and field technicians who work closely with phone and internet providers who ensure a smooth transition when migrating to the new network.
“We recognise larger organisations require a dedicated support team, which is why we’re scaling up and working with our partners to deliver the types of services these businesses expect with minimal disruption to their organisation," continued Simon.
A new partner program called the industry engagement that offers training and accreditation for technology providers and consultants to educate business customers about what they need to do to connect to the new network.
“Our multi-technology model provides us with the flexibility to deliver the rollout at scale and pivot the mix of our access technologies where it makes sense in order to support large enterprise and government businesses," explained Simon.
And lastly there’s tailored pricing that offers increased flexibility on NBN’s wholesale business products* with a new capped pricing model.
Simon concluded in saying: “We will continue to work with industry and keep up with market trends in order to provide access to fast broadband services that meet the needs of Australian businesses now and in the future.”
Earlier this month, the Australian competition regulator began an enquiry into NBN and its quality of service. "We are very concerned about the high number of complaints from consumers around poor customer experiences, particularly in relation to customers connecting to NBN services and having faults repaired," said Australian Competition & Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims.
