General Manager of Nextep Broadband Duncan Wallace offers TWNetwork a snapshot of his business.

Can you begin by providing us with an overview of Nextep?

Nextep is a ‘wholesale only’ provider of broadband WAN and ISP for small and medium business in the Australian market.  As a wholly owned business division of NEC Australia, Nextep has been a pioneer in xDSL-based connectivity solutions since its inception in 2000.

Nextep employs approximately 45 staff and has more than 12,000 broadband services under management.  As a wholesale service provider, Nextep distributes its services through an extensive network of channel partners that include leading tier-two carriers, ISPs, and system integrators.

What characterises value for Nextep when assessing a supplier?

• brand reputation
• reliability and national coverage
• service delivery and support leadership
• flexibility and a “work with” approach
• fair pricing.

What do you value about Telstra Wholesale’s services?

All of the previous values plus:

• in-depth marketing intelligence and support
• solid and approachable account management and executive team
• customer focus
• leading-edge products and scope of product range.

Where do you see Nextep’s growth coming from?

Nextep is well positioned within its target market as a “no nonsense”, reliable, customer-focused provider of national broadband WAN and ISP solutions.  We continually build on our strengths and enhance the experience our channel partners in doing business with us. 

Nextep’s core strength is removing the complexity of broadband connectivity and simplifying choices of access type, speed, technology, service levels and price.  With this as the foundation of our business model we are positioned to continue to service our target markets in the new world of National Broadband Network and Long Term Evolution (LTE).

We can already see an increasing demand for higher bandwidth connectivity solutions, both fixed and mobile, largely driven by rapid growth in converged communications and other business applications.  As a result our product mix is changing from traditional ADSL-type services to higher bandwidth BDSL and low-end Ethernet fibre services which drive higher ARPU.

We believe network hosted applications (software as a service, network based storage and security solutions) will be the next frontier for our markets and we are developing a roadmap to satisfy this emerging demand.

No matter what the driver, the fundamental remains the same: a continued focus on delivering fast and secure data in a reliable and cost effective way.

What do you see as some of the emerging trends and threats in the market?

Trends:

• secure, high bandwidth mobile access
• affordable Ethernet connectivity (for our target markets)
• hosted applications
• network-based storage and security
• enhanced or customised B2B service delivery and service assurance.

Threats:

• National Broadband Network: unknown landscape
• price wars from other broadband service providers
• left-field competitors e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft who are striving to make carriage irrelevant!

Facts about Nextep

Nextep is a true Next Generation Digital Services Provider:

• national coverage
• owns and operates 95 DSLAMs nationally, uses Telstra as its premium supplier
• operates a national ATM Core network with an Ethernet edge
• 99.999 per cent availability in the core
• end-user Ethernet connectivity
• seamless CPE interface transparent to multiple access technologies
• addresses the needs of small and medium business.