If you don’t mind having a whinge when your internet is taking a sick day, the ACCC has got a trial for you.
The competition regulator has kicked off a program asking for 4000 NBN-connected households around Australia. It’s part of a broadband monitoring program that will, when complete, provide an information resource for people so they can get a better gauge of what internet speeds they’ll actually get, along with what plans are right for them.
The ACCC needs all households though, not just those on the NBN:
We need volunteers across many different retail service providers over a range of broadband technologies and on different retail speeds and plans. We’ll be testing NBN services, as well as some ADSL and next generation fibre services. At this stage, the program will not test mobile, satellite or fixed-wireless broadband services.
Selected volunteers will be contacted sometime between July and September. If you’re picked, the regulator will give you a piece of hardware that can monitor your internet speeds. You won’t be charged for the device (and the ACCC won’t pay you for your time, either), and the ACCC stresses that “the international experience tells us that this has no impact or very minimal impact” on those who take part.
The ACCC will start releasing data in the second half of the year, although I wouldn’t expect anything until late August-September at the earliest (given they would be contacting people in July, and then those people would have to receive and install the devices, and then collect enough data over various points in the day).
If you want to try for the “I Want To Win The Hardware SpeedTest Lotto”, you can fill out a form for the ACCC here. Applications close on July 31.
Comments
9 responses to “The ACCC Wants 4000 Homes To Test Their Internet Speeds”
I would volunteer, but i can barely load speedtest website let alone actually test it.
That’s actually a good test.
Probably not the one they want though! They are likely to select a few guys with godlike speeds, boost their connection even more, then advertise the speed they get.
how is the ACCC going to ‘boost their connection’?
My understanding is that this is being conducted with NBN co. NBN is hoping to show that the problem with speeds/outages isn’t with their network but the amount of CVC that the ISP’s are buying.
The problem with NBN is reliability, my average speed down is 90, but every second week we seem to have outages or our ping times are obliterated on the way to the Darwin exchange.
I’m sure the device they send out will be capable of capturing that data, but whether it factors in their report is another story.
This programme is probably in direct response to complaints the ACCC has received, so I’d expect the monitoring to cover time-of-day dependent behaviour of the service provided by various ISPs (both in terms of raw bandwidth and latency).
its getting better, the congestion that is @ my POI kattaning