Is your internet service provider (ISP) ripping you off?

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is checking if ISPs are delivering the internet as fast as they advertise.

Over the next few months it plans to physically install 4,000 internet speed monitoring devices on modems around the country - it will then name the underperforming ISPs. The idea is to educate consumers. Despite Australians spending billions each year on broadband, four out of five don't know what speeds they're signing up for, according to recent ACCC survey.

Is your broadband much slower than advertised? Email hack@abc.net.au

Though confused, we're willing to complain. Slow internet was the number one complaint to the Telecoms Ombudsman last year. Since then, Australia has slipped further down the rankings of average internet speeds - we're now 50th, behind Thailand, Kenya and Romania.

There's a lot of people out there frustrated, confused, online and Australian.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims told Hack the monitoring program wasn't only checking the performance of ISPs, but also the National Broadband Network (NBN).

"If everyone in the area has low speeds then problem then the problem is with NBN, if some people have low speeds, the problem is with the ISP."

"Just us watching I think is going to improve performance enormously."

How can ISPs improve speed?

Factors that affect broadband speed include:

How many people in the house are using the one connection

The quality of the wire or fibre the data travels from your house to the exchange

The distance from your house to the exchange

How much bandwidth capacity the ISP assigns per customer

The first factor is up to you, the middle two are up to the government-owned operator of the NBN, (if your area has NBN), and the last factor is up to your ISP.

Under the NBN, the ISP buys capacity from NBN Co. The ISP has competing demands: it can save money by assigning more customers per megabit of capacity, or it can have a better service by providing more capacity per customer.

If the ISP puts on too much capacity, it'll be sitting idle and wasting money in the daytime. If it puts on too little, it'll be congested in the evening, the period of peak demand.

Rod Sims from the ACCC said he believed some ISPs put on too little capacity.

"I think there clearly are times when .... the ISPS are not buying enough capacity from the NBN to provide the service they're selling," he said.

"But also on a few occasions the NBN service itself is too far from the node."

Too far from the what?

The node.

There's generally two kinds of internet: ADSL or NBN.

ADSL uses the existing copper wires, NBN uses fibre optic cables.

It gets more complex, but that's the general situation.

The model of NBN that's being rolled out currently is called fibre to the node - data travels from a central exchange on fibre optic cables to a green cabinet box on a street corner. That's the node.

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There it's automatically switched across to the existing network of copper telephone wires that connect up to your modem. With ADSL, a house can be up to three kilometres from the telephone exchange. With NBN, houses are meant to be within 1km of a node.

NBN Co guarantees fibre to the node minimum download speeds of 25mbps - which is very fast. You can stream a movie with 3mbps.

But 25mbps isn't the speed consumers are getting, at least not all the time - ISPs tend to advertise the speed of a package as the maximum theoretical speed. The peak body for the communications industry, the Communications Alliance, argues it's impossible to be more precise, because of all the variables that affect internet speed.

The problem with this is consumers have no idea what they're buying.

Meanwhile, ISPs are able to advertise a product they can't reasonably expect to deliver.

Matthew Enger, the managing director of a small Melbourne-based ISP, said in some cases ISPs were offering 100mbps packages that dropped to 3mbps.

"Providers need to put on sufficient capacity," he said.

"With the ACCC doing their monitoring I think we're going to see more transparency. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the big players get caught out having to put on more capacity because it will show they're not delivering the product they're selling."

The ACCC is looking for volunteers willing to have a speed camera on their modem.

"It is a community service," Rod Sims said.

"You're asking out your fellow consumers. But there's no downside, you're anonymous, we don't keep a record of anything."

"The upside is the feel-good factor of helping out Australian consumers."

"We want to make Australia's internet infrastructure great."