I'm one of 'those' NBN users... (EE Upgrade Part 1)

A while ago, you may have heard about an NBN (National Broadband Network) user who consumed 34tb in a single month. Well, I have recently joined those ranks after establishing a rather robust VM (Virtual Machine) and data backup schedule and now consume somewhere between 25-30tb (Terabyte) a month. Being on a small business plan, which is honestly no different to a residential one, and having multiple WAN (Wide Area Network) IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, I was recently approached by my ISP (Internet Service Provider),  ABB (Aussie Broadband), to move onto an EE (Enterprise Ethernet) plan on the NBN.

But why EE?

This is exactly what I had asked my contact at the time too. The NBN for residential and small business consumers is a shared pool of bandwidth with a rather low contention ratio in most cases, which means if there are any power users in the same area, they will likely negatively affect the experience for other consumers on the network.

EE on the other hand is basically another layer to the NBN and segregates enterprise, or in my case power users, away from residential and small business consumers to preserve their experience while also providing a much higher contention ratio (1:1 in ABB's case). This means that I can max out my connection 24/7 and it would have no effect on the other users in my area.

What do I get out of it?

Based on what we've discussed so far, you would be thinking it's only the contention ratio that is improving and a better experience for others. While this is the case, there are other benefits that are provided for the additional cost.

• Contention ratio (1:1)
• Speeds (250mbit symmetrical)
• New router (Cisco ISR C1111)
• Increase level of support
• Service SLA (99%)
• Knowing that I won't get my service throttled

Where to from here?

As the digital ink dries on the virtually signed paperwork, there is much to do from here until I get confirmation of an upgrade date etc. What I will be doing in the mean time is getting my head around managing a Cisco router and discovering what this change might entail and lead to with other projects.

For now, that's all I've got related to this topic, so we'll see what happens from here.

Cheers,

Jon