NBN Co recently announced the creation of 44 new NBN Business Fibre Zones to deliver premium business-grade fibre to an additional 60,000 eligible businesses premises across Australia, on demand, with no charge for the design and construction of fibre to the premises when they order a premium business NBN Enterprise Ethernet service.
The new NBN Business Fibre Zones will be available for the benefit of eligible businesses in these new locations from 1 September 2021. If the business customer signs up to a three-year plan from their internet retailer, NBN Co will not charge the retailer an up-front connection cost.
It follows NBN Co’s announcement in September 2020 to create the first 240 NBN Business Fibre Zones, offering direct fibre connections and enabling access to business-grade broadband to a growing customer base of around 790,000 eligible business premises across Australia.
The 284 NBN Business Fibre Zones will offer more than 850,000 business locations across Australia access to business NBN Enterprise Ethernet, the company’s fastest symmetrical wholesale product options with a 99.95 percent network availability uptime target designed to help optimise network reliability and help reduce downtime for business.
In addition to high network reliability, Enterprise Ethernet offers access to plans based on the highest wholesale upload speed tier options available on the NBN network and dedicated onshore service plan support for providers via the business NBN Operations Centre. The plans remain flexible for small, medium and large businesses with options for prioritised data, high capacity symmetrical wholesale download and upload speed tiers from 10Mbps to close to 1Gbps service enhancements available to add on to plans.
Brad Whitcomb, Chief Customer Officer at NBN Co, said, “NBN Co has a very clear and simple purpose: to lift the digital capability of Australia. We are therefore expanding the coverage of our NBN Business Fibre Zones across Australia to help support and grow Australia’s digital economy.
“Businesses are increasingly using business NBN Enterprise Ethernet to support cloud-based business operations, remote file storage, content hosting, unified communications, large file distribution, and to connect head office locations. However, for decades the location of a business – whether it’s in the city or outer metropolitan area, peri-urban fringe, regional city, town or rural area – has been the determining factor in the price they pay for business-grade fibre.
“For business NBN Enterprise Ethernet customers, we are helping to level the playing field and ensuring that more businesses throughout Australia can participate in the digital economy on an equal footing, with greater parity on recurring monthly wholesale charges in more locations.”
New wholesale pricing discounts for the benefit of business
The NBN Business Fibre Initiative helps level the playing field for businesses of all sizes and in more locations by reducing the significant variation that has existed in the cost of business broadband services in regional and rural areas compared to CBD Zones.
Eligible businesses within any of NBN Business Fibre Zones that order an Enterprise Ethernet service will receive their chosen speed tier and service based on the same CBD-equivalent wholesale charge that is applied to a company based in a CBD Zone.
In addition to creating 44 additional NBN Business Fibre Zones, providing eligible businesses within these zones access to CBD-equivalent wholesale charges, NBN Co today announced that it will be introducing further discounts for Enterprise Ethernet. The discounted wholesale pricing will be offered in relation to new and existing customers within all NBN Business Fibre Zones. The company will also offer the wholesale pricing discounts to eligible businesses outside of new and existing NBN Business Fibre Zones.
Further discounts within NBN Business Fibre Zones
Businesses that were previously located in Zone 31, which have now been incorporated into a new NBN Business Fibre Zone, will be able to take advantage of wholesale pricing discounts of up to 68 percent.
Businesses located in any of the existing 240 NBN Business Fibre Zones may also benefit from wholesale pricing discounts of up to 37 percent, where the Zone and Bandwidth discounts are combined.
For businesses that are located outside an existing NBN Business Fibre Zone, NBN Co will offer wholesale discounts of up to 58 percent, where the Zone and Bandwidth discounts are combined.
Fibre build cost certainty
From the 9th of August 2021, for eligible businesses located within any of the NBN Business Fibre Zones, NBN Co will offer a no up-front build cost to internet providers when they order an Enterprise Ethernet product. Additionally, if the internet provider signs up for a three-year Enterprise Ethernet service, they will have no up-front connection cost.
For businesses that are located outside an existing NBN Business Fibre Zone, customers are quoted for the design and construction of their required fibre extension to their premises as part of the ordering process5. It is common practice within the industry that when unforeseen costs, such as additional civil works, trenching and site restoration are identified, those costs are passed on to resellers and then to end customers.
To eliminate any uncertainty, NBN Co is introducing a new Fibre Build Quote Guarantee5. For all locations in the NBN fixed line footprint, NBN Co will offer Retail Service Providers a guarantee on all Fibre Build Quotes. It will not pass on any variations to resellers, providing them and end customers much greater certainty on their upfront costs.
NBN Co will also introduce a Service Delivery Guarantee, under which it commits to complete the design and construction of new fibre infrastructure in most business locations within the NBN fixed line footprint within 50 business days. This is designed to be the first step of many improvements to help ensure our resellers and customers are able to get connected more quickly and easily.