NBN Co open for enterprise business

NBN Co has finally launched its incursion into the enterprise market after a year spent working with “a number of service providers” honing the new wholesale product.

The company also launched a trial of premium business-grade appointments, which it had flagged would be part of its enterprise offering last year, and that follows the creation of a dedicated business operations centre in late August.

NBN Co’s chief customer officer for business Paul Tyler said in a statement that the new wholesale services were designed “with the specific needs of global enterprise and government organisations in mind.”

NBN Co has set a target to connect 900,000 enterprise and government customers to its network by FY22.

Even without having a dedicated enterprise connectivity product, NBN Co has been able to connect about 450,000 businesses to the NBN, and says it averages “20,000 new businesses added to NBN Co’s footprint each month”.

The imminent arrival of dedicated enterprise services had been flagged last week when NBN Co introduced a number of new parts to its wholesale broadband agreement.

NBN Co said in these documents that it would offer enterprise customers a default commitment to fix faults and restore services within 12 hours in either metro areas or where a site visit wasn’t required. However, enterprise or government users in regional centres could wait up to 26 hours for restoration at the default tier.

There are optional service assurance products that can be purchased to bring maximum restoration wait times down to as little as four hours.

Where the default restoration time isn’t met, customers qualify for a rebate of between 10 and 20 percent of their monthly fee.

The rebate can be up to 50 percent in serious cases involving enterprises paying for top tier service assurance.

NBN Co said it would target network availability of 99.95 percent.

The company has published a price list but it is largely devoid of actual pricing for most components of an enterprise service.