State of the Internet in Australia

The National Broadband Network (NBN) is Australia's national wholesale communications network whish id currently being built to bring high speed broadband and telephone services throughout Australia. Depending on where you live in the country the roll out may have already happened or unfortunately may take as long as another decade before it gets to your home, school or workplace.

Given the great expense of this major infrastructure project there has been considerable debate about the cost and method of delivering the project. With the change of Federal Government in 2013 from Labor to Liberal & National Coalition the NBN was placed under a strategic review in an effort to reduce the cost from $72 billion dollars.

As an outcome of this budgeting exercise the NBN Co's strategic review has decided to reduce costs of the broadband architecture by using a mixture of technologies, including fibre to the node (FttN) and use of existing hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) would be implemented rather than the original fibre to the home (FttH)  where the optical fibre is installed right to the premises.

So what does that mean in terms of internet speed?

The Australian Labor Party was offering between 25Mbps and up to 100Mbps download, and 1Mbps up to 40Mbps upload on FttH. The plan was to offer 1Gbps on fibre in the future. On fixed wireless 25Mbps download and 5Mbps upload.

Whereas the Coalition are now promising between 25Mbps and up to 100Mbps download by 2016, increasing to between 50Mbps and up to 100Mbps by 2019 with No minimum upload speeds given.

As of 2014 pre NBN, Australia is ranked 30th in the world with an average peak connection speed of 30.1 megabits per second (Mbps), according to Akamai's latest State of the Internet report. This is a 32 per cent increase from the same period a year ago, when the nation ranked 36th with an average peak speed of 22.8 Mbps.

The top 20 countries for fast internet:

1. Hong Kong, 65.4 Mbps
2. South Korea, 63.6 Mbps
3. Japan, 52 Mbps
4. Singapore, 50.1 Mbps
5. Israel, 47.7 Mbps
6. Romania, 45.4 Mbps
7. Latvia, 43.1 Mbps
8. Taiwan, 42.7 Mbps
9. Netherlands, 39.6 Mbps
10. Belgium, 38.5 Mbps
11. Switzerland, 38.4 Mbps
12. Bulgaria, 37 Mbps
13. United States, 37 Mbps
14. Kuwait, 36.4 Mbps
15. United Arab Emirates, 36 Mbps
16. Britain, 35.7 Mbps
17. Canada, 34.8 Mbps
18. Czech Republic, 34.8 Mbps
19. Macau, 34.4 Mbps
20. Sweden, 33.1 Mbps

 

Figures are average peak connection speeds in megabits per second. Source: Akamai