blog It appears as if business and wholesale-focused telco AAPT is expanding its grip on those sectors of the Australian market, after exiting from the consumer side of the industry through the sale of its retail base to iiNet in mid-2010. This morning it announced it would buy NEC Australia’s Nextep division — which operates a substantial DSL wholesale business, with its own infrastructure in quite a few telephone exchanges. The move comes as NEC has recently been pushing further into the traditional IT services industry and away from its historical roots in telecommunications. The media release:
“Sydney, November 14 2012 – Australia’s leading business telecommunications infrastructure company AAPT today announced it would purchase NEC Australia’s Nextep DSL business as part of a long-term strategic Alliance between the two organisations.
Under the Alliance agreement, both parties will work together on several partnership opportunities, leveraging AAPT’s extreme performance network and NEC’s world-class technology and managed ICT portfolio. AAPT will also acquire the Nextep DSL business of NEC, confirming its position as a leading independent provider of wholesale broadband services. Nextep is a wholesale carriage service provider delivering broadband services to urban, metropolitan and regional areas.
“The potential of this partnership with NEC is an exciting addition to our very successful Alliance program, aiming to give customers best-of-breed, pre-integrated solutions of technology, managed ICT and networks from the respective experts in each field,” said AAPT CEO David Yuile. “AAPT is delighted to welcome all the Nextep customers and is confident, given our extensive broadband experience, they will continue to be well served,” he said. The acquisition, which is subject to several standard sales conditions, is expected to be completed by 30 November 2012.”
Interesting structural shift to the industry that one.
Meh, I think it’s a minor thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if NEC had been trying to get rid of NEXTEP for a while.
Agreed on your second point, it was always ripe for the selling, and that’s an NEC hallmark. I was more thinking along the lines of there now being one less DSL wholesaler out there, particularly in the business market, which was/is Nextep’s focus.
The bigger question is, did Nextep have any customers? Have they ever had any customers? :).
They tried selling services from those DSLAMs as busines grade DSL originally but did anyone buy them? Then they wholesaled it to Eftel who promptly pretended theyt built in by bundlking it in with their own “Broadband Next” DSLAMs (you know, the ones that were going to kickstart the VDSL2 revolution ;) ).
Thats two pretty small attempts at getting customers- now they say they rolled out an extra 60 in the last year or two. Who is using them?
The Nextep stuff was primarily business focussed – and yes, plenty of retail ISPs were buying their tails for business customers. Early on, they were the ONLY option outside of Telstra.
Absolutely- but we’re talking almost 10 years ago here. The early 8Mb business ADSL plans (and some SHDSL I think) that they sold had some success but they would have been almost entirely replaced with Annex M ADSL2+ & EoC services by now.
AAPT & TPG’s existing wholesale EoC services pretty much occupy that space now- do you know any ISPs other then Eftel still reselling Nextep services?
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