Telstra Wholesale simplifies business data services

Change made under data evolution program.

Telstra Wholesale has rationalised three of its wholesale business data products in an attempt to cut down on red tape when dealing with its customers.

The carrier claims to now be offering its customers simplified national zoning, pricing and provisioning on its carrier-grade Ethernet (BGE/CGE) and business DSL data services.

The telco said the move was part of its 'data evolution program', which aimed to "reduce complexity and drive simplicity" around its wholesale offerings to carriers, internet service providers (ISP) and systems integrators.

The newly-launched business data access solution (BDAS) represented a "single national access business solution" that Telstra's wholesale customers could ultimately use to provision data services to their clients faster.

Customers were previously required to negotiate separate contracts for BGE, CGE and BDSL. Each was viewed as a separate wholesale platform.

"We're not actually delivering new types of technology; we're just packaging and providing [existing platforms] in a way that allows our customers to be more responsive and provision services more quickly," Telstra Wholesale product and marketing executive director Terry Scerri said.

"It's an extremely complex area when trying to quote and activate [business-grade] data services.

"We're now delivering to the market a solution that offers simplified national zoning and pricing frameworks."

Scerri said about 2,000 exchanges nationally could take advantage of the BDAS product.

He said BDAS had been trialed by three Telstra Wholesale customers over a four-month period. Six customers already use the service.

The BDAS product offered bandwidth choices from 256 Kbps to 1 Gbps, four grades of service, a "single, simplified agreement", "simplified national aggregation, national zoning and pricing framework" and access to a quoting tool called QuoTool.

Telstra was planning to similarly apply the data evolution program to simplify other aspects of its wholesale offerings.

Specifically, it would launch simplified fixed and mobile backhaul products in the future.

"What we're trying to do is to provide the same framework as BDAS for these areas as well," Scerri said.