With Traffic Tipped To Rise By 40%, NBN Pushes To ‘Augment The Network As Quickly As Possible’

In response to more Australians working, studying, shopping and streaming from home due to the looming COVID-19 crisis, NBN Co has said it will “continue to monitor and augment the network as quickly as possible”.

NBN Co is expecting busy hour traffic to potentially rise by 40%, in line with the experience of other countries.

To meet the increased demand, the company is also planning on limiting non-essential maintenance to minimise the scheduled outages in the weeks ahead to make the network as available as possible.

NBN Co has said it is drawing on the situation in Italy – where fixed line peak hour network traffic has risen by 26% – for experience.

Currently, the NBN rollout is 94% complete and is expected to surpass 11 million homes and businesses that are connected to the network this week.

Yesterday afternoon the Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts Paul Fletcher held a virtual industry roundtable, which included senior executives from NBN Co, Optus, Telstra, Vodafone, TPG and Vocus.

“NBN Co and other industry participants are expecting a change in traffic patterns, with higher traffic levels during the day and increased activity in the suburbs as compared to business districts,” Minister Fletcher said. “All of these factors are being taken into consideration with retail service providers in provisioning the network.”

Following the roundtable, the government said they will work with industry leaders establish protocols to guide interactions between technicians and customers that are self-isolating.

If you’re already working from home and are experiencing slow internet connections the NBN has advised customers to: 1) keep your modem in a central location, ideally close to where you’re working, 2) if you are concerned about the age or quality of your router or modem, seek advice from your internet retailer, 3) if your internet is down, it could be your VPN setting that you use to access your corporate intranet and files.