Broadband consumers on fixed-line NBN in Australia experienced record high speeds in May 2021. Most consumers received their maximum plan speeds more often in the busy evening hours of 7pm to 11pm, ACCC’s latest Measuring Broadband Australia quarterly report reveals.
The average Internet download performance in May was 98.4 percent of plan speed during all hours, and 97.6 per cent during the busy hours.
Dodo and iPrimus, both part of the Vocus Group, improved by 5.4 percentage points during all hours and busy hours compared to the previous report, which was the largest improvement of the telcos over the quarter, the report on broadband speed in Australia shows.
Vocus brands have improved their service quality monitoring methods, after the Federal Court found that they historically had not used an appropriate speed testing methodology.
Vodafone and MyRepublic improved their busy hours speeds over the quarter by 4.3 and 3.7 percentage points respectively, compared to the previous report.
Retail service providers achieved between 92.2 percent and 100.5 percent of plan speed across all major NBN plans during busy hours. This is a range of 8.3 percent between retail service providers, compared with a range of 12.3 percent in the previous report.
“The performance gap between retail service providers’ download speed metrics has narrowed significantly in recent reports, however individual consumer experiences by retailer still vary,” ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey said.
Internet consumers on Home Ultrafast NBN plans experienced average speeds between 617 and 715 Mbps. Between 7pm and 11pm, performance fell by 14 percent on average compared with the day’s maximum.
Home Ultrafast are plans where the underlying wholesale product sold by NBN Co has a download speed range of 500-990 Mbps.
Testing has revealed that some volunteers on very high speed plans are unable to receive speeds above 100 Mbps to connected devices due to limitations on Ethernet ports on some home gateways.
The proportion of underperforming services in the ACCC’s NBN fixed-line sample decreased from 8.1 percent in February 2021 to 6.2 percent in May 2021.
