Netspace plans to sail SOHO seas

Victorian ISP Netspace has accused rivals of failing to provide broadband services suitable for SOHO businesses.

Stuart Marburg, managing director at Netspace, said ISPs had ignored the needs of small and home office-based businesses (SOHOs), forcing them to choose between expensive enterprise-grade plans or feature-hungry consumer packages.

"SOHOs to an extent have been stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do they go to the really expensive business plan or go to a consumer plan?" he said.

Consumer plans were unlikely to support SOHO's future business needs, he added.

Marburg said Netspace had launched a range of DSL plans it believed would fill the gap between business and consumer packages for a claimed 67 percent of small businesses that fall into the SOHO category.

"We've got a product that sits in the middle between the home and business prices, with business features and functionality that enables SOHOs to chose a plan that gives a static IP address [for example]," he said.

Marburg said that static IP addresses would help SOHOs host their own web server if they so chose.

The new Netspace packages also offered Service Level Agreements (SLA), he said.

"We had salespeople coming back and saying, 'we have this for the home and this for business', but [SOHOs] didn't want to pay the business prices,' Marburg said.

He further claimed that Netspace's SOHO packages would help SOHOs that wanted to adopt IP telephony and video-conferencing.