The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) warned the RSPs to ensure customers purchasing high-speed NBN tiers have the equipment that supports the speed of the plan promised, reaching its full potential.

This follows ACCC’s recently released Measuring Broadband Australia quarterly report, including NBN Co’s Home Ultrafast products capable of 500Mbps+ wholesale speeds.

According to SamKnows, which prepared the report for ACCC, “very high-speed connections” attained “an average download speed of between 617Mbps and 715Mbps” in May 2021. Using Whitebox hardware probes, the company drew on a panel of 77 500-990/50Mbps services, across both FTTP and HFC technologies.

“We note that these results exclude services where we identified that the volunteer was using speed constrained modem/home gateway equipment and so are unable to receive the full benefit of their high-speed plans,” the report said.

According to ACCC commissioner Anna Brakey, “Our testing has revealed that some volunteers on very high-speed plans are unable to receive speeds above 10Mbps to connected devices due to limitations on Ethernet ports on some home gateways.”

Brakey further added, “We encourage consumers on these higher speed plans to contact their retail service providers to check that they have equipment that can support their plan speeds.”

For the RSPs, Brakey also had a message: “We expect retailers to take appropriate steps to assist affected customers on NBN250 plans and above, both when offering these plans and for existing customers who may require replacement home gateways, or the option to move to a suitable plan speed.”

Earlier this month, the ACCC launched separate Federal Court proceedings against Telstra, Optus, and TPG Telecom, accusing the telcos of misleading representations when promoting 50Mbps and 100Mbps NBN services. According to the ACCC, the RSPs failed to live up to promises to check the achievable speeds of consumers’ connections within a reasonable time frame. The RSPs also was unable to offer options if the consumers were below maximum plan speeds.

Brakey then further added: “The performance gap between retail service providers’ download speed metrics has narrowed significantly in recent reports, however individual consumer experiences by retailers still vary.”

The ACCC noted that the proportion of fixed services labelled as underperforming dropped from 8.2% in February to 6.2% in May. “This is likely due to two main factors: technical in-home wiring issues being addressed for monitored fibre to the node services; and, retail service providers moving consumers onto plan speeds that their service can achieve,” the ACCC said.