Australian broadband speeds reach record highs during pandemic

Consumers across Australia are seeing faster download speeds, as retail service providers now deliver on average more than 94 per cent of plan speed in the busy evening with some monitored services regularly achieving higher speeds than expected by consumers, according to a new ACCC report. The eleventh Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) report, published today, shows that in October retail service providers (RSPs) achieved between 84.8 and 98.5 per cent of maximum plan speed across all plans across busy hours (7-11pm). More than half of monitored NBN services achieved download speeds exceeding the maximum speeds specified in the retail plan description when averaged across all hours of the day. “Speeds in the October test period were the highest we have seen for all monitored RSPs since the start of the MBA program,” ACCC chair Rod Sims said. Fibre to the node (FTTN) connections, however, are still performing considerably lower than other connection technologies. The results show that consumers on FTTN connections who are paying for high speed 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps plans received around 10 and 20 per cent lower speeds than the maximum plan speed respectively, at any given time. Towards the beginning of the pandemic there were grave concerns, given the growing working from home sector and binge-watching by the recently unemployed apartment dwellers, that many companies would not meet the mark on their plan projections.