NBN Congestion drops as Telcos bump up speeds

Under mountains of pressure and more negative publicity than almost any other company in Australia the NBN have announced a new monthly report to be published publicly outlining how they are tracking on a range of metrics from customer experience to network congestion.

Outlining a range of measures which the NBN themselves have likely been tracking for some time, as well as combining with a range of measures which have always been tracked the snapshot monthly report will demonstrate how the NBN is performing in areas from connections, installation and the congestion being experienced by end-users.

• Homes and businesses ready-to-connect
• Homes and businesses connected
• Right first time installations
• Meeting agreed installation times
• Average network bandwidth congestion
• Fixed Line network congestion
• Uptake to higher wholesale plans
• Network availability
• Meeting agreed fault restoration times
• Faults per 100 connected homes and businesses

NBN Co’s Chief Customer Officer, Brad Whitcomb said “We have listened to the community’s feedback and want to assure all Australians that end-user’s customer experience is the number one priority of every employee working at NBN Co.

“Significant progress has been made to improve the speeds delivered during peak hours, with internet and phone providers now provisioning more bandwidth on the network than before we announced our new wholesale pricing options. This has helped to relieve bandwidth congestion on the network from an average of around four hours to 12 minutes per week and to deliver improved broadband services for millions of Australians.

Mr Whitcomb also acknowledged that the speed at which the network is being built may have been affecting the experience for users already connected to the network “We’ve also demonstrated we will prioritise the experience of people who have connected to the nbn™ access network, over the pace of rollout, by temporarily pausing sales on our HFC network until we can ensure the network delivers the optimal service it is capable of.

In the first report, published based on data to February 2018 the network has reported a significant improvement in two key areas; Congestion and user speed plans.

Congestion on the network has reduced from almost five hours per week down to a staggering 12 minutes per week.  This is a result of the telcos investing in what’s called CVC capacity – the bandwidth that connects each telcos customers to the wider internet.

That wouldn’t have been possible without a complete re-think of the NBN wholesale pricing structure – that same pricing deal has led to a huge shift toward the mid-range 50mbps speed plan.

One of the biggest complaints about the NBN is that it’s slow – the fact is most people were signing up to slow plans, this new pricing drives people onto higher speeds for the same money and now 25% of users are on the 50mbps plan or higher up from 17% not long ago and ready to push to 30% of users by the middle of this year.

The job’s not done, but these new monthly reports offer greater transparency over the entire process and network performance.

3,600,000 Aussie homes are connected to the NBN – almost half that which will be connected in the long term, and it’s a huge result to see speeds and congestion improving.