There’s some good news for customers of Business DSL, ISDN and other services that are set to be disconnected.

NBN Co is taking steps to reduce the disruption caused by the impending closure of business communications services such as Business DSL and ISDN and their replacement by NBN equivalents.

As we previously reported, the phase-out of 'special services' as a consequence of the NBN rollout starts in November.

“Businesses will be disconnected [from the old services] either 36 months after the publishing date of the relevant white paper regarding the technology, or 18 months after their area is declared ready for service - whichever option allows for the most amount of time,” an NBN Co spokesperson told Business IT last year.

The first disconnections will occur in November 2018, and affect Ethernet Lite (or Business DSL) and Wholesale Business DSL services to premises served by NBN Co’s fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) and fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) technologies.

Disconnections of other special services such as ISDN, ATM and frame relay will commence on various dates during 2018 and 2019 – see NBN Co's full list.

NBN Co estimates that around 200,000 special services may need to be migrated to the NBN.

What has now changed is that NBN Co is offering what it calls a “subsequent installation” at no additional charge (service providers were previously billed $270 for this facility).

This means an NBN connection can be set up for testing purposes, and then when everything is known to be working properly the cutover can be scheduled to suit the customer.

“This new offer is set to encourage phone and internet providers to migrate well ahead of the disconnection date as well as improve the experience for businesses transitioning services by reducing network disruption and downtime,” said NBN Co executive general manager of sales and marketing Ben Salmon.