12.4 percent of broadband consumers in Australia experience poor Internet services that do not reach their maximum plan speed, according to the Measuring Broadband Australia report.
These are services that achieve less than 75 percent of their advertised speeds in almost all speed tests. Most of the affected consumers paid for NBN50 or NBN100 plans over Fibre to the Node (FTTN) connections.

These slower download and upload Internet speeds are likely to be impacting consumers’ use of streaming, telecommuting, online gaming and using cloud services, for example to store or share photos and videos.

“We now want to see more action from both NBN Co and retail service providers (RSPs) to help the more than one in ten connections that simply do not perform to their plan speed,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said.

Download speed results for Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) connections achieved 88.9 percent of maximum plan download speeds, or 91.5 percent when underperforming services were excluded.

Program volunteers experienced an outage of more than 30 seconds every one to two days, a similar rate to the previous report.

Optus has addressed a technical problem that caused its Internet customers to experience a much higher rate of outages, an average of 2.6 a day.

Recent tests suggest Optus’ level of outages is now comparable to other RSPs.

Most RSPs’ download and upload speeds decreased slightly during the busy hours compared to the previous quarter. MyRepublic and Optus improved their download and upload speeds during all hours as well as the busy evening hours.

RSPs delivered average download speeds of between 80.4 and 86.7 percent of maximum plan speeds during the busy hours of 7pm to 11pm. They delivered between 82.2 and 87.6 percent of maximum plans speeds in all hours.

TPG achieved the highest percentage of its maximum download speed and Exetel posted the highest percentage of its maximum upload speed during all hours.

While most RSPs met their advertised speed claims during busy hours, Dodo, iPrimus and Exetel did not.

The report shows the speeds data for NBN fixed-line services of eight major RSPs. Testing took place in May 2019 using a sample of 1095 volunteers.