Enterprise Ethernet provides access to a wide range of wholesale speed tier options, to help support businesses now and into the future.

These wholesale speed tiers help businesses to invest in an Enterprise Ethernet solution with the knowledge that the bandwidth can be configured to meet not only their current needs, but is designed to meet future needs as well. So they can move confidently forward knowing that as their business expands, and their data use grows, they’ll have a network solution that can meet their ongoing requirements.

Providers can order bandwidth over the network with different network performance characteristics.

Our entry level tier, referred to as Class of Service – Low, provides ‘best-efforts’ data, which means that there are no contractual guarantees on the network performance and so may be subject to congestion at times of high network usage. This type of network data performance is designed for applications that are not time-sensitive such as social media, internet access and email.

For business-critical applications we recommend you consider our priority data classes of service.

In a shared broadband network such as the nbn™ network, there will be times when the demand for data exceeds network capacity. This can result in congestion over the network and businesses using the network will experience slower downloads, buffering videos and lost or limited access to applications.

However, with the priority data feature on Enterprise Ethernet, you can choose applications that will be prioritised ahead of other residential and business data using the nbn™ network.  This means that for these applications, there should be less congestion across the nbn™ network helping providers to offer a reliable, high performing service to their end customers. This is the same concept as an emergency vehicle using a priority lane on a highway – they’re not slowed down by the other traffic in the slow lane.

Service providers can access priority data via the following two classes of service:

• Class of Service – High: all data allocated to this class of service is given priority across the nbn™ network over best efforts residential and business traffic. This is our highest quality data on Enterprise Ethernet with contractual commitments to providers on network latency, jitter and frame delay.
• Class of Service – Medium: this class of service is effectively a mix of the High and Low classes of service – the first 25% of traffic is prioritised across our network. Any data in excess of this first 25% is treated on a ‘best efforts’ basis.

Classes of Service allow the priority offered over our network to continue over the service providers’ network. Essentially this enables providers to offer an end-to-end quality of service for business-critical applications. Enterprise Ethernet is also designed to comply to the global MEF network standards used by service providers around the world.

Applications that deliver real-time data work best when they’re supported by priority data as delays can trigger lost productivity or operational downtime for your business.

Voice calling and video conferencing are ubiquitous real-time applications where delays in the delivery of the data will result in poor quality communications between employees, suppliers and customers. This can result in subsequent lost sales and/or impacts to workplace productivity.

Outside of voice and video, each business and industry will have different use cases of what is a mission-critical application that will benefit from priority data. Some examples include:

• Point of sale (POS) data needed by retailers and supermarkets
• Data used by sensors or robotic machines in high end manufacturers
• Architecture firms using data-intensive cloud-based applications in their design processes
• CRM applications used by front-of-house contact centre agents
• Design agencies, videographers, photographers etc regularly transferring large files

Data over Enterprise Ethernet is only available with a symmetrical profile – same upload and download speeds are available. For applications such as cloud computing and video conferencing, which may be running over a Wide Area Network (WAN) and connecting multiple business premises, upload bandwidth can be just as important as download.

The contractual commitments that nbn makes to providers for the three classes of service are outlined in the table below.

Network performance targets (for Enterprise Ethernet services connected at a local POI - reference distance = 200km):