So Just How Borked Is The NBN?

Despite slight improvements to our fixed broadband speeds, Australia remains well outside the top 50 when it comes to fast internet. We are currently ranked 58th on the Speedtest Global Index with average download speeds of 41.31 Mbps – a huge 25.21mbps below the global average. So what went wrong?

Itâ€™s hard to get an accurate picture on the balance of NBN technologies that are already in place in Australia. To get around this opacity, we used the â€œcheck your addressâ€ tool on the NBN website as a way to collect data on the footprints of technologies currently or about to be in place in three Australian metropolitan cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Note: If you want the fastest internet speed that are currently available, your best bet is to sign up to an NBN 100 plan. While these plans won’t get you anywhere near 1Gbps, they should provide enough speed for intensive workloads and Ultra HD video streaming. Here’s a look at how ISPs price their unlimited NBN 100 plans. (Click on the table for more info on each plan.)

The data suggests around half (40-60%) of homes in the three cities only have access to very old technology: hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC). For people in these residences, access to the so-called â€œfibre networkâ€ remains only a fairy tale.