The first quarterly Broadband Barometer report, commissioned by Pacific Internet, has revealed that broadband penetration among Australian businesses with 50 employees or less is 41 percent, or around 206,000 businesses. This contrasts with figures from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that indicate there are 70,000 business broadband users in Australia.
Dennis Muscat, managing director of Pacific Internet, believes the discrepancy is the result of the ACCC gathering statistics on the type of broadband plan sold, whereas the Broadband Barometer report surveyed small businesses directly.
"It's fairly clear from the way the questions were asked and the way the technology is used and the amounts being paid, it's fairly easy to deduce that the vast majority of small businesses using broadband are using home plans rather than business grade plans," Muscat told ZDNet Australia , admitting that the survey did not directly address the issue. He said the next quarterly report would gather data on the split between in small business usage of broadband plans targeted to the home and to business.
Muscat said that home-broadband plans present a better value for money proposition, with a lower entry cost. Small businesses are not as "preoccupied" with service level guarantees as their larger cousins, said Muscat.
"They're less fussy about things like service level guarantees and rebates for downtime etcetera, they're prepared to take that risk in order to adopt the technology," said Muscat.
The survey found that 77 percent of Australian small businesses -- which represents about 505,000 businesses -- are connected to the Internet. xDSL technologies are the most common broadband access technology, followed by cable modems, but businesses often keep their dial-up Internet access to supplement the broadband connection.
There are no "killer applications" that drive broadband take-up. Rather, the survey found small businesses were primarily using their connection for faster e-mail and Web site access, and for the convenience of an "always on" connection.
High profile technologies such as voice over IP, video conferencing and wireless hotspots generated little interest amongst the survey respondents, who were mostly concerned with network security, firewalls and spam filters.
The survey, conducted by ACNielsen Consult, included 1167 Internet enabled small businesses from metropolitan and regional areas. A small business was one defined as having 50 or less employees, and broadband was defined as Internet access of 256 Kbps or more.
With Telstra providing the "last kilometre" of ADSL and their horrible record for service outages, why bother with business-class broadband. I recommend home plans to all my clients who are predominantly businesses with less than 20 staff. The use of dynamic IP services such as TZO make VPN and SMTP e-mail a snap to setup and maintain.