ACCC Reports on NBN Performance

Electronics & Technology NBN
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Even fibre for most has an asymmetrical appearance eg 1000/50 plans or more commonly the 100/20 or 100/40 plans. Uploads typically with those plans only achieving not quite 95% of the stated speed. So on the 50 Mbps upload ours sits usually at 47.4 (94.8%) but does drop lower in busy periods.

They typically don’t sell symmetric plans to households, and if they did the cost would skyrocket. So having asymmetrical plans allows some cost saving on CVC costs and requirements.

The nbn™ as currently built and costed is a failure, I’m sure we all know that. Fixing it will be expensive both time and cost wise, politically expensive for whomever decides to take that plunge party wise, and will be to our detriment if it isn’t undertaken.

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An old mate lives in Thailand and posted this from his room while staying at the Franjipani Resort in Hua Hin.

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Just to be clear, Thailand is on the list of developing countries, with Gross National Income (GNI) per capita of $7,040. While that puts it in ‘upper-middle-income’ territory (along with Botswana and Cuba, among others), it is nowhere near Australia’s GNI of $53,690.

It appears that at least some countries know how to prioritise national investment for the future. Sounds like Thailand may be a decent retirement choice if one were seeking to make the most of limited retirement income.

And no, I have no idea why Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Bahamas and several others are on both the developing countries list and the high-income list.

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It’s unfortunate that the NBN speed data publicly available is not searchable by Fixed Wireless location. IE by individual Tower or cell. We’ve now 3 not too far away neighbours on NBN FW. Time to ask if they use speedtest.

It’s an aside, assuming high speed internet is a high priority. Likely also useful in learning Thai from home. This summary had be nearly convinced it’s a great place to live. Many Aussies can put up with the intense heat and humidity, the snakes, biting insects and flying cockroaches, spontaneously combusting chilli dishes, even the uncertainty of receiving quality health care. They had me until they added the hazard of mongooses to the list. :sweat_smile:

https://smartasset.com/retirement/how-to-retire-in-thailand

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The mongeese keep the snakes under control. I just couldn’t cope with the climate.

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I could post metrics of just how fast my cats can disappear when I take a cat carrier out of the cupboard, and it would be impressive. But it would be not at all relevent to NBN speeds. :roll_eyes:

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The 16 March 2022 ACCC Report is out.

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Summary:

  • Satellite is missing altogether (still (of course)).
  • WA has the slowest downloads and uploads, followed by the ACT and Tasmania respectively. Must be hard to roll out a network in a territory that is almost entirely made up of a single city :roll_eyes:.

Looking at fixed-line (sorry wireless and satellite people):

  • Exetel looks like a good choice for RSP, as it appears to be over-provisioning and thus delivering better download speeds to its customers.
  • Upload speeds are all pretty terrible across RSPs, compared to what the user is paying for. (None of them hit 90%.)
  • Don’t go with Launtel if you want to frag people online. 20+ms latencies will make for trouble.
    **Vodafone is even worse in WA - average latency of 51.3ms!
  • The ACCC reckons that someone on fixed wireless is generally able to stream at least one UHD video at peak times. I suspect some members of this forum will have things to say about that.
  • People on HFC are getting faster speeds at peak times than they are paying for. Again, community comments will be interesting.
  • Long term trends are statistically insignificant from December 2020 to the current report as at December 2021.

Page 22 is amusing. Underperforming services represent 7% of all those tested, with FTTN making up 89% of that 7%. How is this news?

Fixed wireless performance (starting on page 44)? Pretty garbage - and it is only looking at fixed wireless plus. Don’t even think about online gaming on this stuff. Wait - standard fixed wireless apparently starts on page 52… or 46… or… this report is really badly designed and in some parts seriously misleading. It switches between fixed wireless and fixed wireless plus. Sample sizes are small, either way.

So the report is about as good as what it measures. As we already know, it skips over a lot of issues that are important to people; it also indicates that the NBN has not been improved in any meaningful way over the comparison period.

Final comment: the ACCC might consider removing the “Draft 4” from the PDF title.

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I hit 95% or more, consistently of my upload speed and about 93% of my download speed (Qld).

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It assumes those of us on FW have ‘invested’ in a UHD capable TV. We have not and Full HD is all we can present. Having recently connected to the NBN at home over FW I’d like to say it is great. For another time, other than to say that our local tower delivers performance close to the average reported by the ACCC. IE outside of peak times slightly better than 50 Mbps down and at peak times about half that. The upload speed is regardless of time a dismal 2-3 Mbps. At least the ping time is typically 30ms or less. Overall a very average result given our less than 2000m distance from the FW tower. Perhaps the roof top antenna/array might not be optimally located?

As a comparison at worst about twice the speed of our flakey ADSL copper line, and at best 4 times faster. The challenge with the ACCC results for FW remains the inability to obtain those on a tower (site) basis.

Even without a superdupa all singing magic wireless array that the NBN supplies on the roof, we can demonstrate data rates at least as fast from both Optus and Telstra mobile data. I do need to select the best rooftop location for the mobile phone or pocket modem. Not surprising given the distance to the mobile towers using 4G is 5+km. But surprising given the relative size of either which fit comfortably in a shirt pocket!

I wonder if the ACCC will persist with the performance reporting, or about what it may say in another year or two about the 20-25% of Aussies left behind on substandard internet services. The original promise of NBN 100Mbps speeds for FW seem long gone.

Morrow said that the capital cost of raising the fixed wireless network to support 100Mbps speeds would be “outrageous”.
“We have about 240,000 active users on the fixed wireless network today and expect it to go up to 400,000,” Morrow said.
“If you said for all those 400,000 users we want everyone to have 100Mbps speed to all use in the same concurrency levels in the evening, you would be blown away at the cost.

Would the original cost of delivering higher speeds to fewer customers have been any less per customer?
Unfortunately not commented on by the ACCC, that it’s OK to deliver less half the performance to twice the number of customers.

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This government has apparently declared mission accomplished, beat its chest accordingly, and moved on. Reality might yet catch up with it in some seats.

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The quarterly report is out. This link is to the email that contains a summary as well as links to the report.

https://mailchi.mp/accc.gov.au/mba-broadband-speeds-increase-for-all-consumers-but-urban-services-still-perform-better?e=8965f30595

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I never achieve more than 95% of either upload or download speeds, and I certainly have a SamKnows WhiteBox. I don’t know what premises they measure to get better than 100% of plan speeds but I’d like to be one :smile:

I found out why we don’t achieve over the 100%, NBN Co have over provisioned speeds for Fast and better tiers except Ultrafast. We have an Ultra plan so no over provisioning for us. The over provisioning is explained in a NBN Co page on their site

“ To further improve residential customers’ nbn experience, NBN Co is overprovisioning the downlink component of the Home Fast and Home Superfast products by around 10 – 15 per cent, where possible (with the exception of the new Home Ultrafast speed tiers1-4,6).

NBN Co is planning to overprovision most other existing wholesale fixed line speed tiers starting from between June and August 2020 (with the exception of the new Home Ultrafast speed tiers). The provision of additional download capacity at the wholesale layer is designed to accommodate protocol overhead, which includes the code used to help ensure the correct delivery of data packets, that otherwise impact a customer’s broadband speed. The intention is that more customers can experience download speeds that are closer to the maximum theoretical download speed of their chosen retail speed tier, subject to factors such as the capacity of the internet retailer’s network and the efficiency and throughput of their in-home wiring, router and Wi-Fi equipment.”

While the blurb says Fast and Superfast, they may have just over provisioned a lot of the plans going by their results in their latest release of figures.

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I’d be happy to get 9% of your plan speeds, let alone 90%. :joy:

The good news is after nearly 4 months of the NBN FW it has proven far more reliable and at least 2-3 times faster than our ADSL2 over copper. We’ve been offered a White Box through the SamKnows internet monitoring program. Looking forward to being better informed once it has been delivered and is up and running.

Our NBN is through ABB. Download speeds currently vary approx 30-60Mbps random samples. Upload speeds are typically a less than expected 2-3Mbps.

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My 50 plan has been returning 52-53mbps downloads on speedtest for months. uploads only about 18mbps on the best days. (HFC w/ABB)

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@PhilT and @mark_m, I discovered they have over provisioned the lower speed plans. This is so the overheads that would normally be included within the speed allocation are now covered by the over provisioning. Because of this users are able to experience closer speeds to the plan speed when downloading. In some/most cases this has led to speeds over 100% of the plan’s stated download speed. It is usually the download speeds that are given priority when it comes to speed allocation.

Those on 1,000 and 250 Mbps have not been over provisioned and so the overheads still show up as lower speeds than the stated caps.

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The 9 August 2022 report.

Edit: If one is looking for an RSP it is not obvious what useful information can be gleaned from this data, seemingly collected for the sake of collecting and publishing data. Any one aspect seemingly contradicts it being the best when cross checked looking at another.

An interesting quote is ‘As the majority of outages last for no more than 3 minutes, outages are likely to have little material impact on end user experience.’ 3 minutes in the middle of a movie, or in the last seconds of a sports event, or while trying to day trade must all be equally low impact. Buying a plan with sufficient backup if it critical is imperative in addition to having the fully charged mobile at all times. How is the local mobile signal or is a satellite service the only viable alternative. No reply needed…

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IE Smoke and Mirrors? Comments specific to Fixed Wireless NBN.

The NBN has connected 388,878 customers to Fixed Wireless services as of 11Aug22.
The NBN FW services utilises of than 2200 fixed wireless infrastructure sites and more than 22,000 cells in semi-rural areas and across regional and remote Australia.

The ACCC monitoring program through SamKnows white boxes samples just 73 (May 22 data) of the 388,878 services, 22,000 cells and 2,200 towers. It will be at least 74 when ours is included with the August performance data due in approx 3 months time.

The ACCC is monitoring a relatively small subset of the whole FW installation. For a public funded monopoly why is the NBN Co which has all the throughput data for every tower and cell not legally required to publish it’s results monthly, tower by tower and by area/sector? Hopefully not too difficult a question for the respective shareholder ministers. The ACCC can only do so much?

A second observation on the latest report is the use of average speeds. This evades the core issues

  • of identifying and reporting how many services are underperforming,
  • the true poor busy period speeds many experience,
  • and whether those customers services are progressively improving or declining.

It’s worth noting that with the NBN Co promoting provision of the Fixed Wireless Plus option to RSP’s there has been an increase in the reported average FW speeds. What this service option delivers is an increase to the speed cap imposed by the NBN on customers taking the service on. It delivers faster speeds outside the busy hour/s improving the daily average speeds reported. It makes little difference to the low speeds most observe at peak times or when services are congested.

The NBN Co has said of the faster service it is providing, (although of little relevance when most customers might have more than one stream in demand in the evenings).

The boost in download speeds meant that in December 2021, 98 per cent of Fixed Wireless Plus services could support five or more simultaneous high definition streams, compared to 81 per cent of services in September 2021.

Note of the 73 ACCC monitored services 60 are connected to the highest speed Plus service, and just 13 to lower speed plans. The second are too few the ACCC notes to be statistically reliable.

Hopefully the ACCC and perhaps Choice can encourage more FW connected consumers to take up the challenge and apply for a free ‘SamKnows’ white box.

P.S.
It’s very evident the tower we connect to has a significant congestion issue.
Whether the NBN Co can deliver a practical solution consumers will accept - noted they don’t report to the average Aussie consumer.

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What type of information does the ACCC supported white box program collect/provide.

A sample with an August snapshot, with a focus on download speeds.

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Note average speeds are used to assess performance. The dip in evening performance is typical of any wireless data service where the demand exceeds the design capability of the network.

The ACCC monitoring program provides access to the volunteers to all the data collected and reporting through a personal account. Looking for the best or poorest performance in August? EG slowest download speeds reported in the evening to compare with the averages in the prior graphic.

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For those who make greater use of cloud connected services, in particular online storage options, upload speed data is also provided.

We found the ACCC sponsored white box program easy to volunteer for. The ACCC decides based on your location and NBN technology whether it requires more volunteers in your area.

The supplied device requires minimal technical ability. It requires a spare power point, and connects with a single cable (supplied) to a spare ethernet port on your home modem/router. The instructions are included with the delivered device. It is self configuring no geek required. There is access to support if required as well as a SamKnows community. I’ve not needed either.

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Have you noticed more “Are you a bot?” captcha checks? I think every hour (that the internet is not in more then medium use) the SamKnows box sends network packets to the many of the most popular websites and this I speculate triggers security services?