A project of this scale involves significant investment – which is
precisely why costs for all components of the network will be extremely
transparent. Specifically, these include:
- The building and management of broadband services and interconnection to other networks.
- Providing customer support, fault resolution and service management.
- The procurement of connectivity services (i.e., availability, bandwidth, resilience and security) from the telecoms marketplace.
Migration
to The PSBA Network is already underway. For some sectors and
organisations, the initial order has already been placed – for others
this is imminent. In either case, rest assured support and advice is on
hand to help you in the decision-making process.
What will it cost?
The
PSBA commercial model provides a high degree of visibility of the
component service costs. This includes visibility of the costs
associated with:
- Building and running the backhaul services and gateways
- Providing customer support, fault resolution and service management
- Purchasing connectivity services from the telecommunication market place to meet user requirements
Furthermore,
each sector has the opportunity to present these costs to end users in a
variety of ways to varying degrees of transparency. Therefore, the
true service cost to end users will depend upon both the service
required and the sector in which the organisation falls.
However,
given that connectivity services are purchased in high volumes by the
PSBA supplier on behalf of Partnering organisations, it is expected that
the service costs will be favourable when compared to market prices.
This
is the case for the Initial Order for which firm pricing is now
available. It can be noted that funding arrangements will vary across
sectors. If your organisation falls into the Initial Order, contact
either the PSBA project office or your sector representative to discuss
the costs in more detail.
Who will pay?
All
our partnering sectors have contributed towards a single, pooled budget
to provide the core infrastructure for the project. This infrastructure
includes elements that are common to everyone, including the
development and deployment of the network itself, support services such
as a help-desk; along with service portal, service monitoring,
reporting, billing and technical design support.
What happens when other sectors start using PSBA services?
The
PSBA services are controlled by the governance structures, including a
PSBA Programme Board. This board will need to approve the inclusion of
additional Sectors within the PSBA user community. This approval
process will include defining the terms under which a new Sector might
join the community. Given that, as new Sectors begin using PSBA
services, the unit price falls for each Sector, this approval process
will include consideration of the impact of any potential savings.
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