The little Aussie start-ups taking on the NBN

PEOPLE frustrated with the NBN rollout are looking elsewhere, and these little telco start-ups are a great place to start.

AS MANY Australians wait for the National Broadband Network to be rolled out in their area, a couple of Aussie start-ups are taking matters into their own hands.

The highly politicised NBN project has left many Australians a tad frustrated and some emerging players in the broadband market are hoping to capitalise on the sentiment.

Jeremy Rich is the CEO of Melbourne-based start-up Lightning Broadband which started out as a community organisation in October 2014 and has quickly grown into a legitimate broadband provider for homes, businesses and corporate bodies.

He believes the rollout of the NBN has left a “technology hole” that his young company can exploit.

“The technology under the NBN has changed so many times and it’s just not first class globally,” he told news.com.au.

He pointed to delays and customer disappointment with the NBN and believes there’s a “huge opportunity” in providing alternative broadband solutions to Australian customers.

Lightning broadband uses a mix of fibre optic cable and fixed wireless technology to provide download speeds of 100Mbps as well as 100Mbps upload speeds, outpacing what’s currently on offer from the NBN.

“If you look at Google they’re rolling out fibre and wireless,” Mr Rich said referring to projects the tech giant has rolled out in the US. “We’re rolling out what we believe to be the future best class.”

The company runs fibre cables from its data centre and then uses 5.8 GHz microwave transmitters positioned on tall buildings to beam the high speed internet to dishes installed on customers’ homes.

All home broadband plans offered by the start-up come with unlimited data and a choice of speeds ranging from 25Mbps to 100Mbps, costing between $75 and $120 a month. There is also a $500 installation fee (that comes with a two-year contract) for the home dish.

Lightning Broadband uses fibre cable and fixed wireless to achieve super fast internet speeds.

WHAT SPEED CAN THESE SERVICES PROVIDE?

Rightly or wrongly a lot of the debate around the NBN has centred around the potential speeds provided by different technologies.

The government has often defended its multi technology NBN by claiming a majority of the customers have opted for a lower tier package. But that has not been the case for Mr Rich and his company.

He said a majority of the customers so far are opting for the symmetrical 100Mbps plan. “Once you go a hundred, it’s hard to go back,” he joked.

The company has commenced service in Melbourne’s inner suburbs and hopes to expand throughout the city before turning its sights on more regional areas as well as other cities such as Adelaide and Sydney.

“We’re starting to ramp up aggressively” and are looking to “spread across the country as feasible,” Mr Rich said, adding that an advantage of fixed wireless is that it can be quicker to roll out and connect people.

So far the customer feedback has been very positive, according to the man at the helm who previously sold his solar panel business Energy Matters to US giant Sun Edison.

“They’re just blown away. We get a very good word of mouth referral and we rely on that being such a small business,” Mr Rich said.

Lightning Broadband can provide speeds of 400Mbps for commercial customers but believes it will be a few years until residential customers are asking for such speeds. “As time goes on we’ll be able to roll out faster speeds,” he said.

As he was quick to point out, “internet bandwidth is only going in one direction.”

‘Satisfy your need for speed without the NBN’ is Lightning Broadband’s message.

A SUPER HIGH SPEED FULL FIBRE SERVICE

Another small Melbourne-based telco start-up DGtek is offering its customers an alternative to the NBN, and perhaps most importantly, a full fibre service.

Like Jeremy Rich, after seeing similar types of networks being rolled out in the US and Europe, the company’s founder David Klizhov thought the Australian market was primed for the option of high speed fibre.

“Ideally it (the NBN) would have worked if it was fibre to the home, but it’s taken quite a lot of time and we thought that we could have a go at the Australian market using technology that’s been implemented already overseas,” DGtek’s chief operating officer Eli Bekker said.

DGtek uses 1Gbps GPON cable (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks) and runs it directly into customers homes with the intention of initially capitalising on the dense population of inner Melbourne.

The company is also able to easily upgrade to achieve massive 10Gbps speeds when needed.

“We saw that there was a need for it and we think it will work,” Mr Bekker said.

The company is building its own exchanges, costing about $3 million each and providing a 10km service radius, to give it more control over its network.

In addition to a connection fee between $275 and $500, the company provides service with no lock-in contracts that begin at $80 a month for 250GB of data at download and upload speeds of 100Mbps. DGtek’s top offering comes in at $150 a month with unlimited data and 1000Mbps speeds.

DGtek will also offer free internet service to any government organisations in their footprint such as public schools and public hospitals as well as non profit organisations.

The company has yet to announce the policy but told news.com.au that such institutions will be able to sign up for unlimited data at speeds of 100Mbps with no connection fee, completely free of charge.

Eli Bekker, DGtek’s head of operations.

Just like Lightning Broadband, the sky is the limit for DGtek.

The company is just weeks away from connecting its first customers in the inner Melbourne suburb of Elwood but hopes to expand rapidly throughout the city and further into areas such as Geelong, rural Victoria as well as one day launching in Sydney.

Certain communities in regional and rural areas have lamented their access to high quality internet, and some have even not been entirely pleased with the options provided by the NBN. And that’s something DGtek hopes it can perhaps use to attract customers to its service.

“We’re very interested in covering regional areas,” Mr Klizhov said.

“At the moment we’re collecting information from the customers, depending on that information we’ll make a decision as to which way we go next but we are looking forward to building up the regional areas.”

Right now the NBN is a long way from being rolled out in Elwood, where DGtek is based, but when it does arrive the company is confident it will be able to whether the storm.

“The whole idea is that we’ll be faster, cheaper, better,” Mr Bekker said.

“We’ve got a lot of inquiries with customers currently on NBN (100Mbps down and 40Mbps up) and they are asking to switch to us.”

NBN FOOTPRINT EXTENDS TO THREE MILLION PREMISES

On Tuesday, NBN Co. released its latest figures showing the company is on track for its 2016 targets.

The NBN’s current footprint stands at 2.9 million premises with 1.1 million homes and businesses already connected.

NBN Co. CEO Bill Morrow hailed the figures as a major success for the company in addressing the digital divide in Australia.

“As we have confirmed throughout the year, the rollout of the NBN network is very much on track,” he said.

“Today, nearly two thirds of the nation’s premises are currently in design, in construction or able to order an NBN service, and that is tangible progress.

“Of the 2.9 million premises able to order an NBN service, 70 per cent of these are in non-metro and regional Australia as we step closer to bridging the digital divide and connecting Australia.”

The company also said that customer satisfaction had increased from 6.6 to 7.2 points out of 10 in the past 12 months.

The NBN gets rolled out in Penrith.