NBN Co releases medium business services

Business customers waiting for improved speeds and service levels from the national broadband network have been given more options to choose from, as new plans are released to service providers.

The company's 'medium business services' were announced last year to complement the existing asymmetric offerings that started at 12 megabits per second downstream and one megabit per second upload, topping out at 100/40Mbps.

But the low-end medium business service that provides 5, 10, 20 and 40 Mbps symmetric down and upload speeds, delivered over passive optical fibre, is six months behind scheduled launch.

According to NBN Co's June 2013 Reinventing Enterprise Communications report [PDF], the first phase of the medium business services was scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of last year, but is only now being made available.

Furthermore, NBN Co said it will supply the low-end and higher speed connections - that reach up to 1GBps downstream and 400Mbps upstream - with the Traffic Class 2 service, which prioritises video conferencing and collaboration.

The faster business services were previously to be provided with the lower Traffic Class 4, or best effort, according to the earlier NBN Co plan.

In the June 2013 document, a Traffic Class 3 committed capacity option was included. iTnews is seeking clarification if NBN Co has removed this option for the current offerings.

Service level restoration and response times have not changed since the services were first announced. NBN Co promised to restore outages 24 hours a day, seven days a week with additional eight and 12 hour fault rectification windows available, as well as a one-hour response time.

The design availability of the medium business services was said to be 99.9 per cent in last year's document, but NBN Co has not said if this will be retained.