TPG offers $45 monthly wholesale FTTB package

TPG has opened wholesale access to its fibre-to-the-basement network for $45 a month in a bid to meet a new carrier license condition imposed by the Government on would-be NBN competitors.

Since last month, TPG has offered the wholesale product boasting download speeds of between 50Mbps and 100Mbps through its AAPT subsidiary. 

The sudden introduction of the new carrier license condition in December last year had forced TPG to temporarily suspend retail sales of its FTTB product until it could create a wholesale offering.

"We withdrew the retail product, then we worked on making the [new] wholesale product available," TPG chief operating officer Craig Levy told iTnews.

The new wholesale service went on sale just days before TPG relaunched retail FTTB services.

Under the Government's new license condition, providers competing with the NBN are required to offer at least a $27 per month Layer 2 wholesale product offering speeds of 25Mbps down and 5Mbps up. 

TPG, however, has opted to introduce a fully managed service instead of a strictly Layer 2 offering (which only provides partners the data link, on top of which they can create their own plans).

TPG general manager of enterprise and wholesale Mark Rafferty said the company would introduce a Layer 2 offering in the future.

"The actual changes to deliver a Layer 2 product definitely take a lot more network requirements," he told iTnews.

"We've offered a fully managed product that people can take straight to market. A lot of them are very interested in the lack of complexity, the simplicity of the product, that there's no requirement for capital investment."

Rafferty declined to comment on how many retail partners TPG had signed up in the month its iFTTB wholesale package has been on sale.

Slims portfolio

TPG has also taken the opportunity to simplify its FTTB offerings.

"We reduced the amount of retail and therefore wholesale products that were available [from four to one]," Levy said.

"It just simplified things - otherwise we'd have to have four retail and possibly four wholesale products."

The service is only available to selected buildings - the ISP is currently rolling fibre into the basements of 500,000 apartment complexes across metropolitan Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.