Although the number of NBN complaints are up, contrary to what many say its not mainly about the speed but the delays and poor service.
One of the best known and widely used measures of Australian internet speeds is the Netflix speed tests which are a company like ours, both with a vested interest in wanting an increase in the NBN speed, so it is worth having a rant about the NBN speed. Since it is widely used and easy to understand, I will use this as a measurement.
Today Australian speeds by ISPs are all about the same.
Overall it is up because of the increase in speed by our largest ISP Telstra which was holding everyone back as you can see here.
Now, how do our speeds compare to the world standards?
I decided to measure Australia by the four leading technology countries, which are known for being high tech.
As expected we are not doing that well by this measurement but we are certainly not disgraced by anyone here. If there were any measurement that I would expect us to go down, it would be by something like this. If you look at the graph, you can certainly see that at least we have dramatically improved here. Look at Japan it is a shocker, how do you go down that much, now that is a disgrace?
I then checked by top four countries with money by GDP
We are average here.
I then decided to compare Australia to the English speaking world and again we about average.
But I do not think any of these are a fair measure, Ireland, Kuwait, Israel and Singapore are all small countries. Two are little more than city-states. Australia is a huge country, so its silly to compare Australia to some of these countries like some critics of the NBN do. So I decided to compare us with the four largest states in Netflix.
For a big country, we are doing well. This is what the graph looks like and note that it has been since March 2017 and September 2017 when Telstra got its act together that we started dramatically to improve.
So I do not see our score as bad.
Overall being average is nothing to be proud of, but our large geographic area and our low population density suggest that we are doing well with our internet speeds.
