As Australia's two million small businesses look at alternative ways to reach new markets, boost their efficiency, and cut costs, NBN Co today announced it intends to offer telcos and internet service providers new high speed wholesale broadband services which can be tailored to the specific needs of the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and small business market.

At a forum in Sydney today, NBN Co outlined plans that are designed to allow telecommunications and internet service providers to offer packages for small business that enable them to use their broadband for quality voice services, and to offer enhanced service levels to support the longer hours of business operation.

"Using NBN Co's new services, telcos and ISPs have potentially more flexibility in putting together packages that give small businesses access to big business functionality at affordable prices," said NBN Co Head of Product Development and Industry Relations, Jim Hassell.

"Our research indicates that many home office/small office operators and small businesses are currently using standard residential services for their telephone or broadband, or opting for business-grade offerings over copper-based ADSL2+ services. Beyond this, for larger small businesses, there is a quite a big jump to business-grade fibre-based services.

"For example, there are small design and video production companies that need to send large files to their customers, which are paying for services designed for much bigger businesses. Our aim with the new offerings is to allow telcos and service providers to design plans that cost-effectively add higher levels of service to suit a range of increasing needs.

The NBN product suite proposes to offer more incremental pricing tiers to enable a telecommunications or internet service provider to offer a wider range of plans at different price points to suit the individual needs of businesses of varying sizes.

"In addition to high download speeds, one of the big advantages of the wholesale business grade NBN products for small business, when compared with an ADSL service, is the availability of much higher upload speeds," Jim Hassell said.

NBN Co will provide wholesale level speeds of up to 40 Mbps* at the layer 2 level in its small business offering.

"Many small businesses also operate long hours or on the weekend, so we plan to add extended hours to our service level agreement - from 7am to 9pm seven days a week, with a one hour response time and 12-hour restoration time in metro areas."

For service providers, NBN Co plans to release the pricing in a few weeks time providing new increments in Traffic Class 1 intended to support multiple voice services using the existing monthly access service speed tiers. It is scheduled to make the additional product and service options available early in the third quarter of next year.

NBN Co also outlined its intention to issue further product releases for medium-sized business and enterprises in the future.

MEDIA INQUIRIES:

Rhonda Griffin
NBN Co
Mobile: 0428134401

*NBN Co is designing the NBN to be capable of delivering these speeds to NBN Co's wholesale customers (RSPs). Speeds actually achieved by retail customers (end users) will depend on a number of factors including the quality of their equipment and in-premises connection, the broadband plans offered by their RSPs and how their RSP designs its network to cater for multiple end users.

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