NBN Co believes that one-thirds of its customers are on the wrong plan for their needs, based on their bandwidth use.

The company submitted their findings in a submission to the ACCC, offering information on its “maximum utilisaton” measure, which is used to monitor whether a user’s speed and data allowance plans match their consumption.

This data is then feed to services providers, who, of course, use this to sell upgrades.

According to NBN Co’s definition, a user would hit ‘maximum utilisation’ if they reached their download or upload speed limit twice a month.

“The lower the maximum available bandwidth, the longer applications such as game downloads will take to complete,” NBN Co explains.

“Even with services operating at their maximum speed, these game downloads can take several hours to half a day to complete.

“NBN Co believes this is a poor customer experience.”

The company found that, as of April 2022, 45 percent of all NBN 25Mbps services in operation reach their maximum possible utilisation at least twice a month, “suggesting that these services are being used at the limit of their bandwidth capacity,” NBN Co said.

This has increased from 33 percent in April 2021.

“Across all speed tiers, 29 percent of NBN services in operation achieve their plan’s maximum utilisation threshold at least twice a month.

“This suggests a high level of usage intensity of the NBN network, which is rapidly increasing over time.”