Australia’s NBN watchdog can finally stand down

The Measuring Broadband Australia program was created because Australia was experiencing broadband performance issues; Paul Budde writes that it is now over because the problem has largely been resolved.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has marked the end of an important chapter in Australia’s telecommunications history (ACCC) decision to terminate Measuring Broadband Australia program.

When the program launched in 2017, it solved a real problem. Australian consumers were paying for broadband services that often failed to deliver promised speeds. National Broadband Network (NBN) the rollout was still mired in controversy, evening congestion was common, and customers had little way to independently verify whether they were getting the service they paid for.

The ACCC’s monitoring program has brought much-needed transparency to the market. It provided an independent measure of broadband performance and helped protect both. NBN Company and retail service providers are responsible.

Therefore, it makes sense to close it. This signals that the broadband performance issues that led to its creation have largely been resolved.

For more than a decade, I have argued that two policy decisions undermine Australia’s broadband ambitions. The first was Fiber to the Node (FTTN) dependency, which left the end part of many connections dependent on outdated copper infrastructure. The second was the Capacity Virtual Circuit (CVC) charging model, which encouraged retail providers to limit capacity and contributed to evening congestion that frustrated many consumers.

The ACCC’s final report effectively confirms these concerns. The gradual replacement of FTTN with fiber and the removal of capacity-based charging has significantly improved broadband performance across the country.

Ultimate Measurement According to Broadband Australia reportfixed-line NBN services now deliver on average 99.4% of advertised download speeds during the peak evening period between 7pm and 11pm. Average download performance at all hours of the day reaches 100% of plan speeds.

These figures are a far cry from the early years of the programme, when broadband services delivered only 80 to 85% of advertised speeds during peak periods.

Equally important is the significant narrowing of gaps between retail service providers. In the early years of the program, some providers consistently outperformed others. Today the ACCC reports much less variation in performance; This means consumers are much more likely to get the speeds they expect, regardless of the provider they choose.

The report also highlights a sharp decline in the number of underperforming services. In 2018, almost 14% of fixed-line NBN connections were classified as poor performance. This figure has now dropped to just 5.6 percent.

It is not surprising that many of the remaining problematic services are still found on FTTN connections. More than 10% of FTTN services in the monitoring sample were still classified as underperforming. This strengthens the case for the ongoing fiber upgrade programme, which is steadily replacing copper-based connections with full fiber services.

The report also shows how far Australia’s broadband infrastructure has improved. High-speed NBN Home Ultrafast services on 1,000Mbps plans delivered average download speeds of between 861Mbps and 875Mbps throughout the day, with almost 80% of tests reaching at least 900Mbps.

Importantly, the final report provides a broader view of connectivity in regional and remote Australia by including fixed wireless and satellite services.

NBN fixed wireless services continue to improve, delivering almost 90% of advertised speeds at all hours and around 84% during peak periods. While the results do not match the consistency of fiber-based services, they show a significant improvement compared to previous generations of wireless broadband.

The emergence of low Earth orbit (leo) satellite services have arguably been the most important development in regional communications. The report shows that Starlink provides average download speeds of over 230 Mbps during all hours and around 200 Mbps during peak periods.

For many Australians living beyond landline infrastructure, this represents a transformation in connectivity that was hard to imagine when the tracking program began. While traditional geostationary satellite services such as Sky Muster remain important, the advent of low Earth orbit satellite systems has fundamentally changed the broadband landscape for remote communities.

The ACCC stressed that the end of the program does not mean the end of oversight. Broadband providers will remain responsible for delivering the performance they advertise and the regulator will continue to monitor service quality through other reporting mechanisms.

Still, the outcome of Measuring Broadband Australia must be considered a success.

The program was created because Australia was experiencing broadband performance issues. It ends because that problem has been largely solved.

No network is perfect and some challenges remain, especially where legacy copper infrastructure is still in use. But Australia now has a broadband ecosystem that consistently delivers the performance consumers are buying into. With ongoing fiber improvements and the rapid development of satellite technologies, the country is in a much stronger position than it was a decade ago.

In this sense, the ACCC’s final broadband monitoring report is more than a collection of performance statistics. This marks the end of an era in Australian telecommunications and confirms that the long struggle to build a reliable national broadband infrastructure is finally delivering the results promised to consumers.

Paul Budde IA is a columnist and managing director of independent telecommunications research and consultancy. Paul Budde Consulting. You can follow Paul on Twitter @PaulBudde.

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