By the end of 2014, NBN Co plans to complete the plan on new products that would help bridge the $11.5 billion funding gap between the costs of building the NBN network.
NBN Co is also seeking and negotiating with different electricity companies to help NBN Co cut electricity cost for the thousands of nodes that they need for the NBN network.
NBN Co was in the final stages of modelling on how they can provide new products such as faster speeds on its NBN Wireless Network and NBN Satellite Broadband offers, and how much they could get in revenues from these new products said John Simon, NBN Co head of product development.
Federal Government provides a maximum $29.5 billion, with the rest to be made up by cost cutting and revenue streams at NBN Co. We all know that the project will cost roughly $41 billion and it’s a part of the effort of NBN Co to meet the cost in building the NBN network.
“There’s a whole bunch of things we could provide as additional services to generate more revenue,” Mr Simon said. “I’m looking at products and services that we can deliver to the market that generate revenues that have not been currently earmarked in the roadmap or aren’t your traditional residential, consumer or small business broadband services.”
“We’ll be working systematically through how we can better monetise our assets and deliver a higher economic return by putting a bit more innovation in there.”
SingTel-Optus, Vodafone Hutchinson Australia and other network users complained about the price increase of Telstra that they will charge to its rival users. NBN Co has a plan to launch a service to connect the mobile phone towers to the NBN for a fee by the middle of June 2015.
“This quarter, we’re going through the productisation and systemisation of a range of [products] such as high speeds on demand or networks on demand,” Mr Simon said.
“A multi-dwelling unit (such as an apartment building) might say we want to fibre optic cabling all the way into the building or it could be a commercial area … with some form of co-payment.”
He also mentions that the NBN is working on selling high speed products to NBN Wireless broadband users to make more money since wireless broadband are limited to download speeds of 25 megabits a second.
“High speeds potentially mean higher speed tiers and higher [subscriber charges],” he said. “If you think about the satellites we’re building and launching … there’s a lot of capacity sitting there between 7am and late afternoon and there’s a whole bunch of things I think we could provide as additional services to generate more revenue.
“There are some services we think aren’t being deployed in Australia that could be [and] they won’t go cannibalising existing revenue streams from existing providers but could provide substantial uplift.”