If you’re experiencing slow speeds, unusable services and drop-outs, you’re not alone. These were the biggest complaints people had about their Retail Service Providers (RSPs) in the 2016 financial year. We also know that, when switching to the NBN, picking a provider that will deliver on its speed promise can be tricky.
For these reasons and more, we want to test broadband connections as part of the CHOICE broadband performance monitoring project. We’re aiming to discover the real-world speeds for RSPs to help you choose the right provider, or switch to a better one.
Why join?
We’ll check your broadband connection to see how the speed measures up against what you’ve paid for and if the service is running smoothly.
We’ll aggregate the speeds and publish the results every month to help you, and all Australians, compare RSP providers on their speeds.
How does it work?
Register with your email, home address and details of your plan.
We’ll contact you if you’re eligible to join the program.
An eMetric broadband smart meter will be sent to your house that just plugs into your router.
If you’re interested in joining the project, please sign up using the button below.
##>> REGISTER NOW <<
Well done CHOICE. This is a survey that should have been independently commissioned by the Govt to monitor the performance of an NBN that they have spent $ billions of dollars on. Unfortunately I can’t register as I’m still on the waitlist…maybe sometime in 2020 if lucky (or should that be unlucky?). From the coverage on the ABC I get the strong suspicion that many people have had a less than satisfactory experience with the changeover. Begs the question as to why that much money has been spent on a patchwork mix of a dog’s breakfast of different technologies when the result has been a network that is poorer than the one it replaces. It would have made much more sense to stick with one future proof technology (i.e.FTTP) but of course that would have been inconsistent with the ideology/philosophy of some in the current govt whose goal was to destroy the NBN.
May I suggest that it would also be equally compelling to have a comparison survey based objectively on what we are getting before and after the NBN.
IE a group based on existing ADSL customers who use a common broadband package to monitor usage times and data rates on their current services before the NBN take over. Follow this with the same package to monitor performance on the NBN once delivered and you might have more than legal hearsay. Sorry but that is how the lawers representing NBN Co might respond to any evidence from your current proposal.
My circumstance relates to a smaller semi urban/rural locality with around 1500 residents. Most of us have ADSL on copper. Most of us have only have one key complaint. Lack of exchange capacity at peak times causing data slow down. The balance anecdotally suffer from slow connections due to distance. Unfortunately we often confuse lack of exchange capacity with slow connection speed to the exchange. Perhaps it also suits NBN Co that we do.
The community and nearby towns have recently lost a battle to block NBN wireless towers on environmental and visual amenity impacts. The hope was to force at least an FTN solution. Within the next 12 months we will have the dreaded NBN wireless solution. This is great for widely scattered communities of perhaps a few hundered. It is not the solution for the faster and densely growing communities in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
Other than peak times (which is an exchange capacity issue) we achieve consistently 12Mb/s download speeds. Not ideal for the future perhaps? With the NBN some in our area might get a faster connection. I’m not expecting any real gain or benefit in speed. I’m anticipating the issues of contention and cell capacity (maximum data limitations per cell) at the local NBN tower will be insufficient for the total number of users and their demands.
As a consumer the plans available to NBN wireless are also much less generous in data allowances for the same cost and in fact I can’t find one to give the same data I currently have or use.
Federation was supposed to provide equally for all Australians. Hope those of us living in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne understand how equal that share is and support changing how the NBN has been delivered.
I’ve recieved my device, and have tried it in the house wireless router and in the nbn modem, as well as taking the SD card out and re-inserting, but the device remains invisible to the emetric testing lab, who are going to send me another device to try.
I suspect they have not done any nbn satellite logging yet, as there was quite a bit of confusion on how the modem and router are connected, and also what sort of fibre connection I had with the satellite!
Received my eMetric Smart Meter last week and have observed that its data usage is around 1.5 GB/day (of which around 1.2 GB are downloads):
This will add up to around 45 GB/month total downloads/uploads, which doesn’t bother me as I always have plenty of unused quota on my 500 GB/month NBN plan, but I can see it being an issue for some.
Can Choice provide more info on its data usage for participants in general? The FAQ is pretty vague on the question, in effect saying ‘don’t worry about it’, but it seems significant enough to warrant better disclosure.
hmm, that is not my experience at all, I only had 30GB of peak use + 50GB 1am to 7am until last month, (but now increased to 45GB and 100GB), and did not go anywhere near my limits. Off-peak was a fraction of a GB and peak <20GB including all our normal usage, so the device uses negligible data here.
We have an unlimited data allowance so for us the issue is not even on the radar. And even if it was as high as the others suggest it might be when tallied against our very normal very high usage (in the terabytes) this would be negligible. However I do sympathise with others who may be on very limited usage plans but I am very sure and do think that eMetric would only really be sending small packets of data gained from the logged usage interrogations the device undertakes.
@gordon was that the increase you wrote about on the NBN wiki? If so, is it useful for you? or is it a miss hit due to the Sat issues still?
Yes it was, our plan was increased from 30/50 to 45/100 peak/off peak (OP=1am to 7am), so it would seem that there has been a 50% increase in usable allowance. The only off-peak use we generally have is my weather station software uploading small text files every 10 mins and hourly graph uploads.
It might be useful for those times when MS decide to do massive Windows10 updates, but otherwise we are still suffering terrible performance from the satellite.
Slow loading, no loading, time outs, excessive buffering etc.
nbn sent me another survey recently, and I let them know how bad it still is.
Thanks I will update the wiki to reflect the changes.
Yeah the result no matter how much they increase the allowance is still almost useless it would seem. Maybe they see this as a way to pay you off for the results Sat users get?
Hi @syrup and @draughtrider , just to let you know, I’ve asked CHOICE staff involved to see what info they can provide in answer to the questions in addition to the FAQ.
Hi @syrup, @grahroll, @gordon and @draughtrider The eMetric is designed to enable line testing using variable data amounts. It’s intended that those participants with smaller data limits will have small amounts of data used in the testing. In your case, as you say, the data usage is a small portion of your overall monthly limit. To know the data limit, we asked participants to tell us their plan’s allowance. However, in numerous cases this information was missing or turned out to be inaccurate when looking at the broadband usage. In these cases, the data used for the performance measuring is adjusted to ensure it’s appropriate for the actual monthly allowance. We are working through the process to ensure that each eMetric uses an appropriate (and minimal) amount of data for each participant’s GB limit. If you have any concerns or questions, you can email the eMetric team at Enex using helpdesk@emetric.com.au.
The complexity of the project in terms of recruiting participants with an even spread of areas, connection types and speed plans doesn’t lend itself to doing before and after NBN measuring unfortunately. It’s designed to capture real world NBN speeds against plan speeds. We are rolling out a second batch of devices and it’s planned to have a portion of these on legacy services so we may have some point of comparison down the track.
