The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has released the findings of its latest National Broadband Network (NBN) speed tests which discovered that some consumers continue to receive substantially slower speeds than others on the same plans.
The ACCC’s third Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) report provides new data on the performance of NBN services from the major internet service providers (ISPs).
It found that the ISP with the fastest broadband this quarter was TPG followed by Aussie Broadband, iiNet, Optus, Telstra and MyRepublic, with the latter picking up speed considerably on the last quarter.
Overall, it said, 69 per cent of all tests continued to achieve download speeds of above 90 per cent of the maximum plan speeds, while seven per cent of tests recorded less than 50 per cent of the maximum.
Chair of the ACCC, Rod Sims said the industry claimed it was working hard to contact customers whose NBN connections were not able to deliver the maximum speeds of their plan.
“We encourage customers who aren’t getting the speeds they expected to contact their internet service provider to see if they need to change plans,” Mr Sims said.
“We will continue to closely monitor the progress of industry in remedying this issue.”
He said the good news for customers was that broadband speeds did not slow significantly in the busy hours (7 to 11pm) with average speeds across all busy hours reducing by just one percentage point compared with the average.
He said NBN services continued to outperform ADSL services, with NBN plans sold with a maximum speed of 25 Mbps on average achieving a download speed of 22.7 Mbps during the busy hour, three times the average busy hour download speed recorded for ADSL plans.
“We are pleased that the MBA program is being taken very seriously by internet service providers and is delivering noticeable improvements to customers’ broadband speeds,” Mr Sims said.
“We note NBN Co has reported that congestion has increased slightly in recent months.
“Our results suggest that ISPs not featured in this report could be contributing to this, as the overall results featured in this MBA report do not show an upward trend in congestion.”
The ACCC’s 16-page Measuring Broadband Australia report can be accessed at this PS News link.
