The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has released its latest report on broadband in Australia, finding that despite speeds slowing slightly at night, the overall results “continue to be good”.
Chair of the ACCC, Rod Sims said however that the sixth Measuring Broadband Australia report also showed that 12.4 per cent of consumers continued to experience underperforming services that rarely came close to reaching their maximum plan speed.
“These slower download and upload speeds are likely to be impacting consumers’ use of streaming, telecommuting, online gaming and using cloud services, for example to store or share photos and videos,” Mr Sims said.
“We now want to see more action from both NBN Co and retail service providers (RSPs) to help the more than one in 10 connections that simply do not perform to their plan speed.”
He said that in many cases, limited speeds were caused by in-home wiring issues that could be fixed with a visit from a technician.
“If these services were able to reach close to their advertised plan speed, RSPs’ download and upload speed results would improve by two to 6.8 percentage points in the busy hours, and their average upload speeds by 1.5 to 10.7 percentage points,” Mr Sims said.
He said the ACCC report also tracked the rate of outages experienced by consumers, showing that program volunteers, on average, experienced an outage of more than 30 seconds every one to two days, a similar rate to the previous report.
Meanwhile, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has issued its first infringement notices designed to ensure telcos provide consumers with adequate information about their National Broadband Network (NBN) services.
Member of the ACMA, Fiona Cameron said the Agency’s standards required telcos to provide clear and meaningful information about their NBN plans in one-page key facts sheet and in their advertising.
“Failing to give consumers clear and honest information about NBN plans is unacceptable and can lead to misleading conduct as recently highlighted by the recent Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman’s report,” Ms Cameron said.
“Telcos need to provide information that will assist consumers to choose an NBN plan that suits their needs and if they don’t they will be held to account.”
The 18-page ACCC report Measuring Broadband Australia can be accessed at this PS News link.
