Written by: David Dzienciol, Chief Customer and Commerical Officer
The need to respond to change and evolve with the shifting needs of customers is an evergreen strategy for every business. In the digital era, the need to transform accelerates with every year that passes. Disruption is everywhere and in today’s highly competitive world, if you snooze, you lose.
Arguably, 2020 has been one of the toughest and most surreal times any of us have encountered. Starting with raging bushfires and biblical rains, followed by a global pandemic, it’s what Hollywood blockbusters are made of, not real life. Needless to say, the events of 2020 have changed everything.
A new world and a new way of living and working was thrust upon us overnight. In doing so, it amplified the need for every organisation, educational institution, and home to be supported by a resilient connectivity solution. The linchpin that’s keeping us all connected in a socially distanced world.
Melbourne-based NEXTDC partner, Summit Internet has built a successful business by servicing customers’ need to keep pace with consistent technology change. Throughout it all, the one constant for Summit has been standing firmly behind their passion for doing what they do best, keeping their customers connected, and collaborating with peers and ecosystem partners that share their vision.
At the core of Summit’s success is an inherent passion for delivering world class solutions to customers. To achieve that, they partner with NEXTDC to build the underlying infrastructure and their mission critical plumbing that keeps their services running 100% of the time, all of which is made possible through NEXTDC's 100% service guarantee.
This always-on capability with flexible, agile data carriage with almost unlimited bandwidth is the platform upon which it can then build the service level agreements that customers need in a rapidly transforming world.
Leveraging technology as a business enabler
For over 20 years Summit has rolled with industry trends. Today, that drive to be remarkable in a competitive landscape manifests in flexible, resilient and affordable fixed wireless services, particularly where fibre networks are either incapable of reaching or too expensive to provision.
Amidst the turmoil of this year, never before has enterprise, Government and community been more dependent on staying connected. In many cases this has required improved services and/or additional attention to building redundancy and stability so that connectivity to the people, applications and systems that are most important is always available and with predictable performance.
Architecting its infrastructure, so customer support can be implemented quickly and with options is where Summit’s value really shines.
When Melbourne moved into stage 4 lockdown restrictions in July, a new level of urgency emerged for organisations to bolster their connectivity resilience, with Education being a prime example as students were forced back into home schooling.
For one Summit customer, St Thomas Aquinas College on Melbourne’s south-eastern fringe, the school’s 2400 students and teachers were struggling with an NBN fixed wireless plan that advertised as a 75Mbps service. Under the strain of a locked down community, the service was performing inconsistently and usually at nowhere near that speed, with no performance guarantees to fall back on. Some measurements were coming in at as low as 7Mbps.
Meanwhile, the school’s NBN service only offered a maximum upload speed of 10Mbps, also not guaranteed, and falling well below acceptable levels for a school with similar internet requirements to an inner-city tech company.
Summit took less than 10 business days to fully transition the wireless service to a business grade 100Mbps upload and download capability, underpinned by their service guarantee 24/7/365.
Uploading a single hour-long recorded video lesson, which had previously taken as long as 20 minutes, now takes approximately 90 seconds. That’s a 900% improvement in upload speeds and a 33.33% download speed increase. When you multiply that by the hundreds of lessons each week being delivered, the productivity gain for St Thomas Aquinas College from their new Summit service is already delivering in spades.
The advantages of a connected ecosystem
The innovation and intelligently managed infrastructure that underpins Summit’s network is what enables its clear differentiation in the market. The network revolves around aggregating a range of carrier services, picking the best of breed, point-to-point connectivity options to ensure that customers can get voice and data from anywhere in Australia to anywhere it needs to go in the world.
To achieve this, it has set up points-of-presence (PoPs) in colocation facilities across the nation, now exclusively within the NEXTDC footprint including B2, M1, P1 and S1. By embedding itself in these connected ecosystems, Summit is one cross-connect away from any carrier, IT and cloud service which it then orchestrates into a comprehensive, managed connectivity platform that can be efficiently configured to exact customer requirements.
Under the strict mandates of stage 4 lockdown, the type of flexibility that Summit has designed into its solutions is really starting to show its value. Customers can select whatever speeds suit their requirements – from 10Mbps to 500 Mbps – and, once the service has been provisioned, Summit can facilitate upgrades in near real-time.
It’s not just end customers benefitting from Summit Internet’s fixed wireless solutions. Many managed service providers, ISPs and other IT services companies are moving to bolster their connectivity resilience. As their customers become reliant on resilient connectivity to their teams, clouds, customers and data, they need additional assurance that they too can remain connected.
Summit has been busy building out its network coverage so that other partners in the NEXTDC ecosystem have access to a fully redundant fixed wireless service connecting them to the DC in the event their terrestrial network is disrupted. It’s a sign of the times that we all must be always on and always prepared for change.
Summit chose NEXTDC as its preferred infrastructure partner because we share the same values of putting the customer first and the pursuit of excellence. By never having to worry about power, security and connectivity, all critical components of its service delivery matrix, it can instead focus on innovation and delivering outstanding customer experiences through technology and service excellence.
If you are looking to build resilience into your technology strategy so you’re prepared to respond quickly to a world that is constantly changing, connect with one of our specialists.
