Aussie Broadband declares it won’t sell to customers (when there’s not enough bandwidth)

Aussie Broadband Managing Director Phillip Britt has taken another stand against congested networks by instigating what he thinks is a unique stop-sell measure.

Phil announced the new policy to followers on Whirlpool when talking about the way that Aussie Broadband is managing its network with the aim to avoid congestion.

“We have made the decision that if we are at 80% of the backhaul bandwidth available, and we know an order for new bandwidth is running behind schedule, we will stop selling on that POI,” said Phil.

“That way, we don’t oversell a POI before new backhaul is provisioned. Customers can choose to wait via a presold process, or they may choose to go elsewhere.

“It may mean some short-term loss for us if they don’t want to wait, but it also means that we keep our reputation intact for strong network management and integrity in our approach to sales.”

Phil said Aussie Broadband manages its CVC based on traffic thresholds and graphs. The amount provisioned for each nbn POI is dynamic, depending on customer demands in different geographical areas.

“Whilst we can instigate CVC increases up to our backhaul limit in a matter of minutes, new wavelengths usually take four to six months to provision,” he said. “We have certain trigger points where we do that, so we hope to avoid the stop-sell situation – but we will instigate it if we have to.

“We don’t under any circumstances want customers to be experiencing 6pm slowdowns caused by the way we manage our network. Our aim is for a network that offers customers consistent speeds.

“Our system has the checks and balances to ensure that our sales team can’t oversell the network if we don’t have capacity to back it up.”