NBN Held Up Well During the Latest Lockdowns According to ACCC

According to the latest data from the Measuring Broadband Australia report released by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the COVID lockdowns across certain areas of Australia during the last quarter did not reflect reduced performance on the NBN.

The basis of the report was the measurements taken from 1270 NBN fixed-line and wireless services between August and October 2021. The measurements results revealed that the download performance of the network remained relatively stable, at 9% to 15%, which was even higher than the pre-pandemic COVID-19 baseline compared with the previous quarter.

The stability of the download performance can be largely attributed to the overprovisioning of download speeds implemented by NBN Co last year. In addition to this, the current CVC relief measures also proved to be beneficial.

Optus and Exetel won the bragging rights for average download speeds, but Dodo and iPrimus could record the largest improvement for the second consecutive quarter. In this case, the improvement was up by 4.9% during peak hours compared to May 2021.

However, in terms of upload performance, the number reveals that it remained quite similar to that recorded last May 2021. In this case, NBN services achieved an overall average upload performance of 85.1% during all hours. In the previous report, this was only 84.9%.

SamKnows is the third party that prepared the report for the regulator. According to the company, consumers on very high-speed plans experienced the fastest in September 2021. In this case, the average download speed was between 680-813Mbps across the day. However, these figures also show that the very high-speed NBN plans are more susceptible to congestion during peak hours than lower-speed plans.

In terms of the FTTN services, there has been no discernible improvement since May. Under the standard speed tier, FTTN services had an average download speed of around 6Mbps lower than other technologies.

“There are a significant number of consumers on fibre to the node connections that are not performing as well as other network connections. It is disappointing that progress by NBN Co and retailers to improve these connections has stalled,” said Brakey.

According to the ACCC, if all underperforming services and impaired services had been remediated or even moved to a more appropriate plan, then “the majority of RSPs would have average speeds that met or exceeded advertised speed claims during their busy hours.”