The agreement is for Pacific Internet to deliver a business grade broadband DSL service over NEC's NEXTEP network, a fibre-optic network that covers 60 percent of Australia's population.
-The fundamental benefit is the service level agreement," Dennis Muscat, managing director of Pacific Internet Australia told ZDNet Australia. -What we can do now that we couldn't do before is guarantee a grade of service with uptime and contention rates, that is the number of people on the service at one time."
The new service will offer speeds of up to 6 Mbps, which will allow services such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), e-commerce, Voice over IP (VoIP) media streaming, video-on-demand and data convergence according to Muscat.
-It allows businesses to build their Internet Protocol (IP) networks from a very solid base," said Muscat. He said this allows business with offices in different locations to create a VPN to pass information in a secure environment.
-This particular platform is a true layer 2 product. Flexstream (the network currently used by Pacific Internet) is a layer 3 product," Muscat said, explaining how the new services could be offered. -The layer 2 product allows us to set up our plans and customer relationships very close to the customer, without having to rely on a third party."
