This appeared last week:
Australia ranks 55th in broadband download speed tests
- 09 August 2017
- Written by Sam Varghese
A test of broadband speeds across 189 countries has found that Australia ranks 55th, well behind New Zealand (30th) and miles behind table-topper Singapore.
The table was compiled by British broadband advice site Cable.co.uk from more than 63 million broadband speed tests.
The data collection was done across 12 months ending on 10 May, by M-Lab, a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University's PlanetLab, and other partners.
Speed was measured by how long one took to download a 7.5GB film. The throughput of a single TCP connection was measured, attempting to transfer as much data as possible for at least 10 seconds.
"This data set has been queried for tests run in the year to 10 May 2017; in order to compile a league table of download speeds for countries tests have been performed by at least 100 unique IP addresses," according to the outline of the methodology.
In Singapore it took 18 minutes and 34 seconds for a mean download speed of 55.13Mbps.
By contrast in Australia, it took two hours, 12 minutes and 57 seconds to download the film, with the mean speed being 7.7Mbps.
More here:
No wonder we see articles like this:
How I learned to stop worrying and love my broadband, despite the NBN
Updated Aug 7 2017 at 11:00 AM
Is the NBN getting you down?
Are you awaking irritable and still tired each morning, afraid that Malcolm Turnbull's version of the National Broadband Network has condemned you, your children and possibly your children's children to broadband speeds that are marginal at best right now, but that will lag far behind the rest of the world in years to come?
Lord knows the NBN has been getting me down, and I don't even have it yet.
Ever since the NBN appeared in my suburb, my already very sketchy broadband speed has sunk to a 10-year low, especially for uploads. Many of the smart home gadgets in my house, ranging from Google Home to security cameras, now refuse to work, not all of the time, but all too often.
NBN Co insists it's not its fault, and that my ISP must be to blame. My ISP, which sent out a technician who couldn't find anything wrong with my connection, suggested that it may not be a coincidence that the connection went dodgy soon after the NBN took over the local backbone.
Like many Australians, I'm left standing between two fingers pointing at each other, which in effect means they're pointing at me to fix it.
So, in the hope that some of you might find this useful, here's what I've done . . .
Toxic mix
In the natural order of things, fixed broadband should always be faster than wireless broadband. That's just the fact we've all grown up with.
But such is the shemozzle that is the NBN, a toxic mix of old technologies and politicised cost structures that encourage ISPs to under-service their customers, that wireless broadband is currently faster than the NBN.
On Telstra's 4GX network we've seen download speeds of 350 megabits per second, more than triple what the NBN is making available in my suburb, and upload speeds of 50mbps, 25 per cent higher than the best the NBN has to offer (presuming you even get that speed when you pay for it).
I mention this because there exists home Wi-Fi routers, such as the brilliant Synology RT2600AC, that let you use a 4G wireless connection in conjunction with your fixed broadband connection, to smooth over the NBN's rough edges.
I've plugged an old 4G phone into the Synology's USB port, set the phone so it shares its internet connection over USB (a setting typically known as "USB tethering"), and then told the Synology to use that wireless connection whenever the fixed broadband connection drops out.
If that's too dangerous for you (given the cost of wireless broadband, and the fact that just a few hours of viewing Stan on your TV could blow your monthly 4G limit), you can also set the Synology so it only uses the 4G connection for certain devices and not others, depending on their IP address.
You can set it so the TV always uses the fixed broadband connection, for instance, but your work laptop always gets routed over the 4G connection, so you can still get your work done even on a Friday night when the NBN has ground to a standstill.
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There is nothing to be said and worse I had a note from Optus I was going to be dragooned into the monster in November. Bummer!
David.
Will only get worse once all that health information is sent to the MyHR and streamed live to every household in Australia.
ReplyDeleteTelstra's facing an NBN-induced erosion of its traditional fixed-line phone and internet businesses. By 2019 it will need to start building new business revenue streams. That would be in my reckoning just about right for the MyHR tender to be ready.
ReplyDelete