The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) latest report on Australia’s broadband has revealed that in May of this year, consumers on fixed-line NBN broadband connections experienced record high speeds again.
Commissioner for the ACCC, Anna Brakey said the Measuring Broadband Australia quarterly Report showed that most consumers received their maximum plan speeds more often in the busy evening hours of 7pm to 11pm.
“The performance gap between retail service providers’ download speed metrics has narrowed significantly in recent reports, however, individual consumer experiences by retailer still vary,” Ms Brakey said.
“Our testing has revealed that some volunteers on very high speed plans are unable to receive speeds above 100 Mbps to connected devices due to limitations on Ethernet ports on some home gateways,” she said.
“We encourage consumers on these higher speed plans to contact their retail service providers to check that they have equipment that can support their plan speeds.”
Ms Brakey said the ACCC expected retailers to take appropriate steps to assist affected customers on NBN250 plans and above, both when offering the plans and for existing customers who may require replacement home gateways or the option to move to a suitable plan speed.
The Commissioner said the proportion of underperforming services in the ACCC’s NBN fixed-line sample decreased from 8.1 per cent in February to 6.2 per cent in May.
“However, fibre to the node connections are still not performing as well as other network connections,” she said.
“The Report shows that consumers on 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps fibre to the node plans received lower speeds than the maximum plan speeds at any given time”
Ms Brakey said there was a persistent cohort of fibre to the node customers that were still experiencing slower than expected speeds, that NBN Co and retailers had been slow to address the issue and they needed “to collectively do more”.
She said that for the first time, the Report included video streaming results for the NBN Fixed Wireless Plus plan which showed most plans could support five simultaneous high-definition streams from Netflix, or one ultra-high-definition video stream.
The ACCC’s 78-page Report can be accessed at this PS News link.
