Agree it’s typical of a congested service. There is related discussion on the ACCC NBN performance measurement program at Has any actual NBN customer speed data been published? - #233 by mark_m
Lucky to have an ACCC white box (SamKnows) to collect NBN performance data. The NBN independent of the ACCC measures the performance of everyone of its more than FW 2200 towers and 10,000 cells. Those measurements are not shared with consumers. CIC🙄. Should consumers ask for this to be published. It’s currently still in government ownership.
The ACCC collected in March data from 85 FW customers. It’s a small sample. It reports the averaged down load speed across ‘the busy hours’ across all these services. Some towers have many customers, while there are a significant number of lightly loaded towers. We don’t know how the distribution of white boxes across the NBN sites. It’s an approx 1% sample size relative to cell count.
The baseline NBN service standard was previously a busy hour/s download average of 6Mbps over the month with a minimum of 2Mbps, (one full HD streaming service minimum speed?). FW is described in more recent releases as a ‘best endeavours’ service to avoid any consumer argument over what is a pass/fail.
As good as it has been 6 months ago, approx 18Mbps average download for ‘the busy hour’ for Oct 2022. It’s not reflective of the slowest busy hour for that month, just the average of all the better and all the not so good days. “Lies, damn lies and statistics”, remain the shields for governments and the NBN in this instance.
Over time the average maximum speeds around 2am have remained above 60Mbps which confirms the signal strength at our home is not a concern. Speculatively it’s in part due to the choice of the NBN to connect the local FW towers through a daisy chain of microwave (wireless) links. They are not individually connected directly to the fibre network.
Footnote:
We held onto our ADSL2 copper line service which could deliver 10-12 Mbps until we had 6 months of reliable NBN. Expensive to do so. We only made the move to the NBN last year after more than 18 months of torture with copper line faults. Everyone else along our road had given up on the copper. The techs sent to repair all said there was no way Telstra would replace the line.
