NBN is set to launch a new wholesale business-grade satellite service for remote and rural Australia, focusing on areas where to date there may have been limited or no coverage with no fixed line service.
The move builds on an A$184 million deal struck with Speedcast Managed Services earlier this year, under which the parties have collaborated on a new wholesale business service using the NBN satellite.
“The NBN Business Satellite Service will be complementary to our existing retail Sky Muster satellite service which, until now, has been primarily intended for residential use,” said the company rolling out Australia’s national broadband network.
‘The development is part of our ongoing commitment to evolve our wholesale product suite to better meet the broadband needs of Australians,” added executive GM for Access Products Gavin Williams.
“It follows additional work we did to engineer the network to allow phone and internet providers to double the previously available total and peak wholesale data limits on the residential Sky Muster satellite service.”
Williams said underutilized spectrum from the Sky Muster satellite service will be allocated to the new product, with the company expecting to use less than 15% of its overall capacity on the access technology.
“We will use this spectrum and parts of the Sky Muster satellite infrastructure such as our nine ground stations to support the service,” he added, noting that the new service will initially only be made available to customers in locations with spare capacity to deliver the service.
“These typically sit within remote locations away from the eastern seaboard where we have higher take-up of our existing Sky Muster product,” he said. ‘We are also designing the architecture to allow internet providers flexibility in connection options so they can design products and services to suit their customers.”
Key features of the wholesale offering – made up of two broad wholesale category product offerings for phone and internet providers – include:
Bandwidth services; designed for businesses with more complex networking requirements including wide-area network connections to multiple locations.
Broadband internet; designed for businesses requiring more broadband data, higher speeds along with business-grade service levels.
NBN said the Business Satellite Service products had been developed to allow easy reseller access to the services and to deliver a high degree of flexibility to minimise the effort required to connect end customers.
“These wholesale plans are being designed to be customizable with options for voice and mobility, and varying levels of support, depending on end-user needs,” noted Wiliams.
“This can range from 24/7 support to a full-service management suite, to a more limited offering depending on the criticality of the service.”
