‘Capped’ wholesale monthly fee set to drive competition of nbn™ business products

nbn today announced changes to its wholesale pricing model aimed at making its business-grade services more competitive and flexible.

From October 1 2017, nbn will introduce a new spend cap on its high bandwidth business products* enabling retail service providers to save on monthly wholesale charges.

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 around 11.7 per cent of Australia’s total business market.

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.

The pricing will vary based on the amount of bandwidth purchased by retail service providers each month, with nbn’s higher speed tiers expected to deliver the greatest reduction in overall costs.

The company undertook industry consultation ahead of announcing the new spend cap and confirmed it will replace the nbn™ Business Ethernet (nBE) product, which was scheduled to launch later this year.

Wollongong IT Firm, Internetrix

nbn’s Executive General Manager, Product, Sales and Marketing for Business Ben Salmon said:

“nbn 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™ 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.”

Visit the nbn™ website to learn more about the nbn™ access network for business as well as what you need to do before connecting to the new network.

The nbn™ 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.

Questions to ask before connecting your business to the nbn™access network:

• 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?

Notes to editor

•  *nbn’s Traffic Class 2 wholesale product (offered over FTTP, FTTN and FTTB access technologies) supports interactive applications such as video conferencing, converged business collaboration, IPTV or gaming. It is delivered as a committed information rate (CIR) with defined latency, jitter and loss characteristics.

•  Business data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits (cat. no. 8165.0)