The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) has issued a report as part of its Measuring Broadband Australia programme that continues to monitor the broadband performance for NBN fixed-line services.

In September 2024, the average download speed for NBN fixed-line connections during the busy hours (7-11pm, Monday-Friday) was at 100.9 per cent of the plan speed. This result was consistent with the previous quarter’s result of 100.4 per cent observed during May 2024.

 

The overall proportion of underperforming NBN fixed-line connections decreased from 4 to 3 per cent of all volunteers between the last two reports, a new low in the programme’s history.

The ACCC said that underperforming services very rarely, if ever, achieve at least 75 per cent of their plan download speed.

It added that the proportion of underperforming services with a fibre-to-the-node connection remains higher than other fixed-line technologies. There are a number of fixed-line technologies: fibre to the premises, fibre to the building, fibre to the curb, fibre to the node, and hybrid fibre coaxial.

The number of fibre-to-the-node connections included in the measuring programme has declined over time due to many volunteers upgrading their connection to fibre-to-the-premises.

However, some of these customer’s in-home equipment, such as their older home routers, may not be able to support access to 100 Mbps download speeds or higher.

“We expect retail service providers to help their customers so that their home router does not prevent them from accessing the full speeds of their selected plan,” said ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey.

The latest report is also the first to include individual retail service provider (RSP) results for NBN very high-speed services (also known as NBN ‘Home Ultrafast’ or the 1000/50 Mbps plan).

The report compares data for very high-speed services from four RSPs with the average busy hour download speed per RSP ranging from 812.7 to 882.1 Mbps.

 

The report also looked at web page loading time across eight popular Australian-based webpages. It examined the latency results from September 2024 too, which it says were consistent with results from the previous report during all hours and busy hours.

The ACCC noted that these values are low enough that their effect is unlikely to be noticed by a typical end user, even when using more latency-sensitive applications (such as video-conferencing services or online gaming).

During September 2024, the average rate of outages per day on fixed-line NBN connections was 0.19 across the service providers featured in the report. The average rate of outages per day was 0.1 for services on other superfast networks and 0.18 for NBN very high-speed services.