A report on the speed of broadband services published by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has found that the speed delivered to consumers from the National Broadband Network (NBN) in the first quarter of this year had generally improved.
In its report, Measuring Broadband Australia, the ACCC said data had been gathered in February this year from a growing pool of almost 1,000 volunteers Australia-wide who used a variety of retail service providers (RSPs) and technologies.
Chair of the ACCC, Rod Sims said RSPs’ download speeds generally increased compared to the previous quarter, including during the busy evening hours of 7pm to 11pm.
“This followed a dip in performance during the previous testing period, which may have been due, in part, to RSPs migrating their customers to new wholesale products offered by NBN Co,” Mr Sims said.
“It is good to see providers improving their performance in recent months, including those whose performance was seen to be lagging in our previous report.”
He said the report also examined whether RSPs’ performance matched their advertised speeds, finding that most RSPs were achieving average speeds on their NBN broadband plans across the busy hours that met or exceeded the typical plan speeds they advertised for the busy evening periods.
“Some consumers continue to experience underperforming services that never achieve close to their maximum advertised plan speed,” Mr Sims said.
“This situation impacted 13 per cent of volunteers in the program, including one in four fibre-to-the-node services on plans with a maximum speed of 50 and 100 Mbps,” he said.
The ACCC’s 14-page report can be accessed at this PS News link.
