Fibre broadband connections are not delivering as many advertised speeds as other NBN technologies, data from the Australian competition watchdog has revealed.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's latest broadband measurement report, released on Thursday, showed that people connected to the national broadband network via fibre - which uses more existing copper wiring than any other technology - experienced slower speeds compared to people connected to FTTC, FTTP and local cable networks.
The report showed that the average download speed for fiber users was 80.8% of the speed they had paid for. This compares to 90.7% for fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC), 90.1% for cable and 89.7% for fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP).
Of course, the total included 11% of users who were identified as having less efficient services, whose speed tests were below 75% of the maximum download speed and therefore required restoration of service .
When low-performance services were excluded , other technologies remained at the same rate, while fibre-to-the-node (optical fibre) saw an increase of 8 percentage points.
Fibre-to-the-node is fibre cable to a box, usually at the street, which then uses existing Telstra for the rest of the distance to people's homes. This means that the speed received depends on the quality of the copper line and the distance from the node to a person's home.
The report, which gathered data from 1,125 volunteer NBN users in August, found Optus was the best of the retailers, with an average download speed of 88.5% of its speeds . Vocus-owned Dodoc and iPrimus achieved 79.4% overall and 76.4% in uptime.
The report continues to show ongoing performance issues with fibre-to-the-node technology, which is now the most common way for people to connect to the national broadband network. NBN has sought to address the problems with the technology, last month moving forward with proposing its own methodology for comparing speed tests with the rest of the world based on the download speed people pay for.
While Optus is doing well on the NBN, the company is also moving forward with its plans to move to 5G for broadband that will compete directly with the NBN. The company this week expanded its $70 5G plans to 138,000 homes.
The company's cheapest NBN plan for download speeds of 50 megabits per second is $70, but its 5G plan now offers much higher speeds, up to 400 megabits per second during off-peak times.
