ACCC: NBN Speeds Up, Optus Users Report More Outages

ACCC has released its latest Measuring Broadband Australia report which revealed generally improved speeds on fixed-line NBN services in the last quarter, however, more work needs to be done.

For the first time, outages were included in the report and while many experienced one outage of 30 seconds or more per day — depending on retail service providers (RSPs) — Optus customers reported more than 1.5 outages per day on average.

Via ACCC

Generally, download speeds increased compared to the last quarter, including during the busiest evening hours of 7:00pm to 11:00pm.

However, the ACCC attributed last quarter’s dip in performance to customers migrating to new wholesale products.

For the busy hours, iiNet reported the biggest increase (+4.7%) for download speeds, while TPG achieved the highest percentage of its maximum download speed.

via ACCC

The report also took stock of how well RSPs advertised speeds matched actual recorded speeds, with the promise to “act on misleading speed and performance claims”.

According to the consumer watchdog, certain consumers — approx. 13 per cent of volunteers and one-in-four fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) services — reported experiencing continued underperforming services that never came close to their maximum advertised plan speeds.

Additionally, the report states that these services have a higher latency rate which results in a less reliable experience for video calling, online gaming, and streaming content.

Via ACCC

However, NBN services continue to outperform ADSL with a maximum speed of 25 Mbps and average download speeds of 22.7 Mbps during the busy hours contrasted with 7.2 Mbps by ADSL.

This latest report was constructed of data provided by volunteers across Australia who use various RSPs in February 2019, those interested in signing up can follow the link here.

Read the full report here.