Every quarter, the ACCC publishes a report that gives insight to the NBN and what the experience is like for Australians on all types of broadband. It makes for an interesting read, providing you love a bit of NBN gossip, but luckily for us, we do.
This quarter’s Measuring Broadband Australia report tells us that on average one in 15 NBN customers experience at least one outage per day – mostly, these outages are felt by fixed wireless and hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) customers. At least more frequently than those on fibre to the premises (FTTP).
Last time the ACCC’s report came out, we focused heavily on outages – with iiNet walking away with the title of the telco least likely to suffer down time. This quarter, Launtel was shown as having outages daily, about 17 per cent of the time; but Vodafone had the most frequent amount of outages, even though they only occurred “every other day”. Telstra had the longest (duration) outage – not surprising considering in early May the telco had a shocker. Optus had the most 10-minute or more outages, followed closely by Aussie Broadband. But when you consider outages that last for a few minutes, all telcos probed performed much the same. As noted above, the most common NBN type in use by those suffering outages was HFC. The majority of FTTC outages lasted under a minute.
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The report doesn’t just look at outages, though, it also considers speed tiers. Specifically what percentage of your total promised speeds you’re getting, on average.
Just say, for example, you’re on NBN100 – you expect to get download speeds of 100Mbps. If over the course of 10 days, you’re each day getting speeds of 90Mbps, you’re only getting 90 per cent of your promised speed. With that in mind, I’m moving to the NT.
The only tiers that didn’t exceed their promised speeds as an average were FTTN NBN50 and NBN100 – they averaged 91.7 per cent and 87.9 per cent, respectively. FTTP NBN 250 customers also didn’t get what they were paying for, on average, hitting 97.1 per cent. Fixed Wireless averaged 87.2 per cent of the promised speeds. Basically, users on NBN fixed-line services attained an average download performance of 99.7 per cent of plan speed during all hours. This decreased to 98.1 per cent during busy hours (Monday–Friday). These results are similar to the previous report.
Broken down by provider, Launtel, Exetel, and Optus all exceeded 100 per cent in both normal and peak times. While not falling below 95 per cent, Aussie Broadband, Dodo and iPrimus, iiNet, Superloop, TPG, and Vodafone all fell below 100 per cent during both normal and peak times. Telstra reached 101.6 in normal use, but 99.8 per cent during peak. Just to reiterate, this is fixed-line NBN only. Exetel was the only telco to exceed 100 per cent (101.1 per cent) of promised download speed during its busiest hour.
You can read the Measuring Broadband Australia report here, if ya want.