That gave me a chuckle!
In that article was it implied the practice of “Telehealth” has begun due to the NBN (as well as Medicare paying GP’s for remote consult)? I’ve only seen the practice of doctor / patient phone call and we didn’t need NBN for that.
Just so we can cry tears into our beers there has been a new transfer record achieved over Fibre, while it isn’t something we as householders or even businesses should be looking to achieve it does show that Fibre is being over-looked by NBN Co as the best way to connect households.
Over a approximately 40 km (25 mile) connection this test achieved “a data transmission rate of 178 terabits a second (178,000,000 megabits a second)”, that’s fast enough to pretty much take in Netflix’s entire collection in less than a second. Significantly the way it was transmitted only requires the amplifiers to be changed and can be transmitted over the fibre that is already in place (if you are lucky enough to have fibre of course)…meanwhile if on Copper, Satellite or Fixed Wireless this will not be helpful at all and may in fact be a further punch in the kidneys of fairness.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/ucl-engineers-set-new-world-record-Internet-speed
The latest report. Enough data to make most of it meaningless for any individual.
A question for the networking gurus. What percentage of plan speed is achievable in practice for user data assuming no congestion? Put another way is there an overhead even under the best conditions, if so how much?
More so if you are on satellite or Fixed Wireless which is not covered in the report. I assume the messaging is if you have either you are not really connected to the NBN?
The two tables that I found most enlightening.
The Average Daily Outages >30 seconds, (page 15).
These are Reported by RSP, when in reality all share the same infrastructure for delivery of the service. Should this not be a single statistic against the performance of the NBN Co, subdivided by area or postcode?
Relative performance of the speed plans for streaming as rated by Netflix, (page 8).
The 4xUHD results reveal we need a 100Mbps plan. It’s considered good enough for 89% of customers to provide just a single stream. Can now stop saving up for that 4xUHD OLED panel.
The most puzzling graph is this one that takes up more than half a page. No explanation, it’s far from useful without an explanation. 
I have Aussiebroadband service and can confirm the NBN going down is by far the most common problem for my area, but there have been outages attributed to ABB (servers, DNS, whatever, they do not publicise what happened), not the NBN.
All modern marcom requires pretty pictures. The less information they convey the more successful. Think eye candy and move on 
Yes, every piece of data you send and receive is in packets. Just like packets you send in the mail there is a surrounding (an envelope if you like) then your data is inside that. This envelope of metadata allows the network & internet to know where the packet needs to go & where it came from plus other bits including information so that the whole “message” made up of many packets can be reassembled.
This leads on to where you miss some of your speed tier and that is the overhead that you have to have to keep your connection live to your RSP even if you aren’t traversing the web. These are also packets of data and so are a cost of speed to you that are sent back and forth.
Percentage wise not much but it is some loss of Mbps in total, maybe 2 Mbps on say a 50 Mbps plan, and wouldn’t vary much from that for any speed tier eg 12 Mpbs plan might get 10 -11 Mbps with a loss of 1 to 2 Mbps and a 100 Mbps might lose 2 -3 Mbps.
I’m assuming that what the map is sort of showing (in an abstract way) are PoI (point of interconnect) & ??? POP-2 (Point of Presence) though I would think there would be vastly more POPs.
Sent an enquiry to the ACCC re the Map, maybe they will respond and maybe not…their blab as always fills me with no great anticipation of one (their highlighting in the quote below):
" Responses will usually be provided within 15 business days .
We will respond to you where we have information that may help you, or you have asked a question about your rights or obligations under the law. If this is not the case, you may not receive a response."
EDIT: @mark_m: Response received and the answer is “Thank you for writing to us about the Measuring Broadband Australia - Report 10 - September 2020. In regards to the image on page 2 showing Australia with a series of blue dots connected, this image is simply a page filler and holds only symbolic relevance to what is discussed in the report”. So in other words a waste of ink to make it look better.
Finger painting from a kindy? I took the liberty of superimposing it over some random map.
… hard to see where they were going with that one … I think dot size has been selected to reflect the size of the dot … or something …
It appears that Perth and Adelaide are not pulling their weight, dot-wise. Tennant Creek, however, is absolutely dotted!
Someone here might be interested to know that since Honesty Box closed down, ACCC has started publishing their data set on data.gov.au. We’re looking at publishing it in a format as we have currently on our broadband review and best NBN plans.
Hopefully that can help us solve the blue dot mystery, as pointed out by previous posters.
Does the data set enable reporting by technology and service?
The reports based on customer speed plans have revealed very little on the performance for those on satellite and fixed wireless. For FTTN many customers have speed plans limited not by preference but the technology (distance from the node).
With higher speed plans being made available it would be reasonable to also seperate out more data for the other technologies of FTTC and HFC. They too will hit limits in the speed of the final leg, (lead in copper or cable attenuation) or data capacity of the interconnecting network, (node/POI/backhaul/… or what ever the capacity limiting bits in between the source of data and customer are called).
Consumers are currently limited in ability to properly compare their outcome with others on the NBN. As a nation we are unable to assess the true numbers of under performing and substandard services by measured results.
Slightly Relevant?
The current measurements and reporting appear designed to give only a near perfect score, irrespective of the available speed tier or customer preference.
The NBN solution and ACCC’s acceptance that customers should drop to slower speed tiers until the service is reliable is one “route” to internet damnation.
I hope you can express it in a way that has meaning as the linked chart is a case study of what not do if you want to display data graphically.
I have(had) both - it’s been a while since I’ve done serious performance profiling but as a casual observation Sam was closer to my perceived experience online, for what it’s worth. The discrepancy in reporting between the two was consistent and noticeable, with HB being less optimistic by between 4.3 to 7.2 Mb/s average over the month. That figure is hardly surprising and likely illustrates that the results are relevant across a testing provider, not between providers …
I just took a look, and those types are not included in the latest data either.
I understand they don’t measure them. They do not form part of the types used. Why not? I could hazard it would make the figures look even worse than they already do.
The actual data file appears to be a little more useful, but it only reports HFC, FTTN, FTTC, FTTP and ADSL.
Of the 1,250 units reported, 158 are identified as impaired while the remainder are reported as unimpaired. 90 are reported as underperforming, while a further 135 have no information on this.
The really important information, which is not clearly identified, is whether customers are getting anywhere near the promised bandwidth. The data file identifies the ‘tier’ (except with ADSL) as a text field (e.g. “50/20 Mbps”). Disaggregating this allows one to compare the top promised speed with the “All hour maximum download speed”.
So - across the non-ADSL units that have reported actual performance, the best performer according to my figures is a FTTP node that has a maximum download speed on its 100/20 plan of 887Mbps! This is in Tasmania, with ‘other RSPs’, and is one of 23 nodes that have a greater than 100% maximum download speed (the rest being largely under 110%, with one other outlier at 134.36%). These 23 are a mix of technologies, but largely 100/40 or 50/20 tiers (12, or just over half are FTTP). The RSPs vary as well.
There are 19 units whose maximum download speed is less than 50% of what is promised. Interestingly, Telstra is the standout RSP here, with six of the 19. iiNet comes second, with three. The absolute worst performer is a Telstra FTTN unit in NSW, that is recorded as both impaired and underperforming. With a 50/20 plan, the all hour maximum download speed is 8.27Mbps - 16.54% of what the plan is theoretically delivering.
I had not noticed at the time, but Telstra does not appear at all in the 23 ‘high performers’ that have a greater than 100% maximum download speed.
And I am done with spreadsheets for now. While I considered doing a chart of RSP/performance, Excel is not interested in playing nice and I am too lazy.
With FTTN does it provide any indication of the customers maximum available line speed independent of the plan chosen?
Having a 90% or similar high score on a 25/5 plan on FTTN might sound great. If the line in use is limited to 40 Mbps, it is misleading because there is no information to clarify if the customer really wants a low speed plan.
For the future:
Do we need to think broader?
With HFC as I understand customers should be able to also upgrade conveniently to speeds as high as 1Gbps. Our Brisbane HFC service is a single cable with a splitter to service 5 town houses off the one lead in. To date the NBN Co and RSP have not provided a sensible response concerning the capacity of the system to deliver 5x 1Gbps over the single feeder.
Smoke and mirrors, future upgrades are conditional on …?
Currently the maximum capability is about 40 Gbits per second from what I can read so 5 X 1 Gbits per second could be doable but then you have to count every other connection coming off the parent coax that feeds the street/block and then every other connection until you hit the fibre concentrator. A big ask if all that is taken into account.
