ACCC: TPG wins again on NBN speed

Alex Choros - Managing Editor + Group Telco Editor

Last updated 06 August 2019

The ACCC has put out its sixth Measuring Broadband Australia report, with TPG once again coming out on top in terms of real world NBN speeds. TPG customers were found to receive 86.7% of their plan's maximum speeds during peak hours (between 7pm and 11pm), putting the telco ahead of Aussie Broadband, Telstra, Optus, and more.

The report currently covers nine major providers - Aussie Broadband, Dodo, Exetel, iiNet, iPrimus, MyRepublic, Optus, Telstra, and TPG. Here's how they stacked up:

Average percent of max. download speed

	Overall	Overall excluding under performing connections	Peak hours
Aussie Broadband	86.6%	90.0%	85.3%
Dodo	82.2%	88.1%	80.4%
Exetel	85.1%	87.3%	82.8%
iiNet	85.3%	90.7%	84.2%
iPrimus	82.2%	88.1%	80.4%
MyRepublic	85.1%	91.2%	84.8%
Optus	86.7%	91%	85.5%
Telstra	84.2%	91.1%	83.1%
TPG	87.6%	91.5%	86.7%

While there is some distance between the best performing and worst performing telcos, there has been some movement across providers. Optus and MyRepublic both showed improvement when it came to overall speeds and peak hour speeds. MyRepublic's speed gains have been significant enough to take it from being one of the slowest performers last quarter to a place in the top four.

TPG and Aussie Broadband both saw slight drops in overall and peak hour speeds.

While there is positive news in the report, the ACCC once again found that consumers continue to experience under-performing services that never achieve close to their advertised plan speeds.

This situation affected 12.4% of volunteers partaking in the Measuring Broadband Australia program. Most of those affected are Fibre to the Node (FTTN) customers on either an NBN 50 or NBN 100 plan.

When you exclude under-performing connections, TPG still comes out on top, but is only 0.3% ahead of MyRepublic. In fact, TPG, Telstra, Optus, and MyRepublic are all within a single percentage point of one another.

The Measuring Broadband report also tracks outages that last over 30 seconds. Optus came out worst, with an average of 2.6 daily outages. However, the ACCC notes that Optus has since distributed a firmware update to its modems with the intent of reducing the rate of outages. Data collected during the first two weeks of July suggests this was successful, with the average dropping to 0.5 per day.

Other providers covered in the report had an average of less than 0.6 per day. Here's how providers stacked up:

Aussie Broadband: Approximately 0.5 daily outages
Dodo: Approximately 0.6 daily outages
Exetel: Approximately 0.5 daily outages
iiNet: Approximately 0.25 daily outages
iPrimus: Approximately 0.6 daily outages
MyRepublic: Approximately 0.25 daily outages
Optus: Approximately 2.6 daily outages
Telstra: Approximately 0.35 daily outages
TPG: Approximately 0.2 daily outages

While the overall report looks like a win for TPG, it's always worth taking these results with a grain of salt. The testing was conducted throughout May 2019 across just 1,095 NBN connections. All but 44 of these households have a connection with one of the nine providers featured in the report.

If you're after a new NBN plan, check out our guide to plans from the providers mentioned in this report.

Alex Choros

Managing Editor + Group Telco Editor | X | Instagram | Threads | LinkedIn

Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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