NZ Broadband Report for January 2012
[Original article with charts: https://www.truenet.co.nz/articles/nz-broadband-report-january-2012]

Downloading a Webpage

TelstraClear have adjusted their ADSL performance, improving to second on the DSL rankings this month. This brings us to 5 ISPs downloading our dummy webpage in less than 0.5s, up from 2 when we started reporting in August.

In the same month Orcon seem to have slowed their webpage downloads to more than 0.5s.

Vodafone remain the ISP with number one ADSL performance. TelstraClear Cable remains the best overall performer again.

Snap has two very different groups of probes, with about a third of their probes taking less than 0.5s, but the majority taking more than 2s to download a webpage .

Downloading a File

When we look at file download performance by time of day a different picture emerges. Our chart highlights the only two ISPs delivering performance better than 95% of their best at all times of the day. Snap & Telecom both achieve better than 95% of their best hourly performance at all times.

Snap, while being the slowest ISP at opening our dummy webpage, has a very consistent file download speed performance throughout the day. They are best at 6pm during peak usage hour, and at their slowest (97% of their best) at 3am when Internet usage is at its lowest ebb. This pattern is the opposite to most ISPs.

Telecom, which has a very good webpage performance, also has consistent file download speeds throughout the day, and is equal to Snap for overall time of day performance. Telecom's performance shows an off-peak/peak performance typical of most of the other ISPs, with their worst measurement occurring at 6pm, a peak usage time. Their slowest speed was 96% of their best.

No other ISP delivers consistent file download performance better than 95% of their best average speed for every hour of every day in a month. This could be due to network capacity, network design or interconnecting links, but is within each ISPs ability to improve, even if it requires a change in backhaul provider.

Note, we dont report actual download speeds because they are distorted by the distance of probes from DSLAMs, which is outside an ISPs control. Our investigations to date with TrueNet data, show that their is no discernable difference in best ADSL throughput speed by ISP, the differences we have found is between their worst performances by time of day. To provide a meaningful comparison, we compare average download speeds by hour with the best overall performance of each ISP.

ENDS

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