Max evening NBN speeds improve: Customers hit peak more often

Family using laptop at table

The ACCC’s latest Measuring Broadband Australia report has found that customers with fixed-line NBN connections experienced record speeds throughout May 2021. Most customers were also able to receive their maximum plan speed more frequently during the peak evening hours of 7pm-11pm. 

The report showed that the average download performance throughout May was 98.4 percent of plan speed during all hours, and an impressive 97.6 percent during peak hours. 

Performance between providers narrowed since the last report, with all achieving between 92.2 percent and 100.5 percent of plan speed across all hours. The range of 8.3 percent between all retail service providers in the sample is down from 12.3 percent in the previous report.

The percentage of underperforming services in the ACCC’s fixed-line sample fell from 8.1% in February 2021 to 6.2 percent in May 2021. This is down from the 13.9 percent that the ACCC reported in its first Measuring Broadband Australia quarterly report in May 2018. 

The ACCC did report, however, that fibre to the node connections are underperforming compared to other connection types, with customers on NBN 50 or NBN 100 plans of this variety consistently receiving lower than their maximum speeds. 

Home Ultrafast plans, sold with maximum download speeds between 500-1000mbps, experienced on average speeds between 617mbps and 715mbps throughout the day. Between the peak evening hours of 7pm-11pm, speeds fell by 14 percent on average when compared to the day’s maximum.

Hardware can limit your speed

The report found that some customers on NBN 250 plans or above were using routers and gateways that have ethernet ports limited to 100mbps. This caps any device connected to those ethernet ports to 100mbps, even though the user may have a faster speed plan. 

Ensuring you have the right modem and router for your home internet plan will help you get the most out of your NBN service, and aren’t limited in speed or capacity by any technology. 

The ACCC excluded customers from this report with NBN 250 plans who had their speed constrained by their ethernet ports, however they plan to include these in further reports. 

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