Commission releases first report on broadband

SUNDAY JUNE 15 2008

Commerce Commission releases first report on broadband quality

The first quarterly report on New Zealand broadband performance has been released by the Commerce Commission. Commissioned from broadband measurement consultancy Epitiro and ICT analyst firm IDC, the report examines the relative performance of New Zealand's internet service providers (ISPs).

Amendments to the Telecommunications Act have explicitly empowered the Commerce Commission to monitor the performance of telecommunications markets and report on this work. Accordingly, the Commission has been producing regular monitoring reports and has now extended its monitoring to include the quality of broadband services.

The Index measures thirteen ISPs every fifteen minutes on a 24/7 basis across eleven sites in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. Performance is evaluated on eight key performance parameters, including time to connect, email round trip times and packet loss levels, which impact the end user's broadband experience.

Telecommunications Commissioner Dr Ross Patterson said, "The report is designed to provide New Zealand consumers, businesses and industry observers with objective data on the quality of broadband services. This first report provides base data against which future progress can be measured each quarter."

The full report is available on the Commission's website www.comcom.govt.nz at Monitoring and Reporting Background

Epitiro provides services to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) enabling them to benchmark customer performance across dial up, cable, broadband and wireless connections.

The ISP-I™ platform and technology from Epitiro emulates an Internet user's activity and gathers a range of detailed statistics including connection speed, reliability, performance and email delivery for independent analyses.

ENDS

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