The latest ACCC report on broadband measurement, conducted every few months by the Australian Consumer Protection Agency, revealed a growing difference in download speeds provided by competing retail service providers.
The report presents a number of rigorous comparisons, but the most relevant of these measures is the average download speed provided by an RSP as a percentage of the maximum speed a plan can achieve.
This is done during peak hours (defined as between 7:00 pm and 11:00 pm) as well as "busiest hour" and is often presented by RSPs as "typical evening speed". For example, TPG was found to reach (on average) 86.3% of its plan's maximum speed, which would be equivalent to 86.3 Mbit/s for an NBN100 plan.
Optus steals the throne
Although TPG ranks first in the last three reports, it is now surpassed by a significantly improved Optus, which grew 2.1% to deliver 87.6% of its advertised download speeds during busy hours.
Telstra and Exetel were also up, rising by 9.7% and 2.0%, respectively, to 83.8% and 84.8% respectively. Aussie Broadband, iiNet, MyRepublic, TPG and Dodo & iPrimus all saw declines, with the latter falling 4.0% overall, giving it a final rate of 76.4%.
"It shows how the performance of RERs can vary and why it's beneficial for consumers to do their research," said ACCC President Rod Sims. "We encourage consumers to compare RSP speed reports at peak times with actual performance."
It should be noted that the ACCC found that it was truly impossible to reach the maximum speed of the plan, even during off-peak hours, with download rates "never exceeding more than 95% of the speed of the plan."
The report also measures factors such as the number of failures by technology type and their duration. HFC (hybrid fiber coax) connections were found to have the highest average daily failure rate and longest outages, while fiber-to-node (FTTN) and fiber-to-site (FTTP) connections were slightly better.