The National Broadband Network, or NBN, as it is known, will forever change the face of Australian telecommunications.

As reported on Senator Stephen Conroy's website, the National Broadband Network will be the single largest nation building project in its history.

This is significant telecommunications infrastructure.

The NBN is a wholesale market, designed for telecommunications and even just digital media businesses across Australia to provide the end solution to the customer.

So why is this important to your business and how will it affect doing business going forward?

The NBN will deliver speeds we have not seen previously at an average business, remember what it was like trying to do business with dial-up?

Content delivery across the NBN will be critical, a whole new emerging industry will take form

There is to be an estimated 25,000 jobs created to run the NBN

90% of Australian consumers and businesses will have access to the NBN

Currently, most phone services delivered to businesses is done via older technology, some over 50 years.  The flexibility for the businesses is somewhat limited.  An example would be try going to the US or Europe and finding a ISDN service, they got rid of that technology over 10 years ago, yet traditionally in Australia it is our core service to deliver phone services to businesses.

Where the significant trend will be the flexibility to businesses.  I give you one example, traditionally businesses purchase onsite phone systems, sometimes well over $50K just for the hardware.  When the NBN is in place and a retailer of the NBN network is available, the reliability factor of this solution will be as high as one could hope for.  Therefore having such expensive hardware onsite won't be of much interest as it once was.  So then you have the hosted phone system model, which suddenly opens up a whole emerging market.

The benefits to business is if a retail provider of the NBN is not performing, changing will become much easier.  Simply inform the new provider of your phone system settings, pick a date, change over, it will be that simple.  The functionality of a hosted phone system on the NBN solution will have significant benefits as well, like if you have a senior manager needing a home extension, done in 5 mins, fully functional extension.  Converting voicemail to email and other similar functions, will be the entry level of the phone system solutions on the NBN.

So to prepare your business for the NBN, my advice is not to purchase any onsite hardware and start to familiarise yourself with the solutions that are already on the market.  Get yourself familiar with the term "cloud computing" as I suspect with the infrastructure of the NBN, I would expect this to finally take hold as the dominant way to operate as a business.  Finally, have a strategic technology business plan in place to understand at what points the NBN will affect your business and how to take advantage of that fact.

In summary, you could always contact us to obtain our assistance and we can take care of all your business direction.