NBN Co. executive general manager for SMB Brendan Donohoe confirms NBN’s collaboration with various local and state governments to expand more business fibre zones across the entire country. 

During the Telstra Vantage event, the executive general manager said: “We are in lots of conversations with local government, state government [and] councils around bringing business fibre zones to more and more towns.”

“There's nothing to announce yet but there are definitely discussions underway, and there's a lot of interest in more and more towns wanting to become business by design,” he further added.

In addition to this, Donohoe also said that the business fibre zone initiative had been very well received. As a result, almost 860,000 business premises across the country are now leveraging business fibre zones. In addition, the company intends to bring fibre connectivity to businesses that were unable to make the migration previously.

“In the last 12 months, 52% of our sales have been to a business with less than 20 staff. That’s obviously very relevant to the SMB market but it's also very relevant to larger customers with smaller sites, where previously fibre was out of reach,” Donohoe added. It should be noted that 27% of sales have been to regional locations.

Apart from local and state governments, NBN Co has also been collaborating with Telstra. This is to foster bringing fibre connectivity to more business locations. Kevin Teoh, the head of customer growth and technology sales for Telstra, shared the example of the companies’ collaboration to connect more than 2,400 sites across the Woolworths Group network with FTTP.

According to Teoh, the companies could complete the migration from the existing VDSL network to NBN fibre a year ahead of schedule. In this case, an average of around 50 sites was connected daily. This was achieved through close cooperation.

Teoh said that: “I think it's fair to say it really took a huge amount of collaboration and care between our teams to help this customer get that outcome.”

“Through this deployment, we actually developed the technical capability to allow customers to change their tech type - for example from FTTX to FTTP - without changing their network identifiers or infrastructure asset details, such as FNNs [full national numbers and] IP addresses,” he further added.

Telstra and NBN Co also collaborated on the deployment of a dual-link SD-WAN network. “[It was a migration] from lower bandwidth MPLS links to two links - one Telstra and one NBN - at five times the bandwidth. All for about the same price,” Teoh said.