Optus dethrones TPG in latest ACCC NBN speed report

Alex Choros - Managing Editor + Group Telco Editor

Last updated 07 November 2019

The ACCC has put out its seventh Measuring Broadband Australia report, and it's a bit of a shocker. Five-time champion TPG has been dethroned by Optus, which is now top dog when it comes to real world NBN speeds. Optus customers were found to receive 87.6% of their plan's maximum speeds during peak hours (between 7pm and 11pm), putting the telco ahead of TPG, Aussie Broadband, Telstra, 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	85.3%	88.7%	84.2%
Dodo	79.4%	85.6%	76.4%
Exetel	86.3%	87.2%	84.8%
iiNet	83.7%	90.8%	82.6%
iPrimus	79.3%	85.6%	76.4%
MyRepublic	84.9%	90.7%	84%
Optus	88.5%	91.3%	87.6%
Telstra	85.3%	90.8%	83.8%
TPG	87.8%	90.8%	86.3%

Most ISPs fared worse this time around, with everyone but Telstra, Optus, and Exetel demonstrating slower speeds during peak hours in this quarter's report compared to last quarter's report. Dodo & iPrimus fared the worst of all, with a 4% drop in peak hour performance. Other providers only saw drops ranging from 0.4% to 1.6%.

In addition, the ACCC once again found that some consumers continue to experience under-performing NBN services that never achieve close to their advertised plan speeds. However, this has dropped from 12.4% to 11.4% of volunteers partaking in the Measuring Broadband Australia program in this quarter compared to the previous quarter. 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, Optus still comes out on top, but is only 0.5% ahead of Telstra and TPG. In fact, Optus, TPG, Telstra, iiNet, and MyRepublic are all within a single percentage point of one another.

The Measuring Broadband report also tracks outages that last over 30 seconds. In past reports, Optus fared the worst, but has since distributed a firmware update to its modems to reduce to the rate of outages. This appears to have been successful, with Optus now only reporting 0.26 daily outages, down from 2.6 last quarter.

Here's how providers stacked up:

Aussie Broadband: Approximately 0.16 daily outages
Dodo: Approximately 0.16 daily outages
Exetel: Approximately 0.3 daily outages
iiNet: Approximately 0.32 daily outages
iPrimus: Approximately 0.16 daily outages
MyRepublic: Approximately 0.37 daily outages
Optus: Approximately 0.26 daily outages
Telstra: Approximately 0.14 daily outages
TPG: Approximately 0.32 daily outages

While the overall report looks like a win for Optus, it's always worth taking these results with a grain of salt. The testing was conducted throughout August 2019 across just 1,225 NBN connections. All but 58 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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