Northland Broadband Short on Speed

Northland Broadband Short on Speed

2012-07-20

Internet Performance by New Zealand Regions

Regional differences show a need for more investment by ISPs to support Ultra Fast Broadband in Northland and broadband in the South Island.

*Many factors impact performance, but two with the most influence are connection distance to the nearest exchange equipment; and capacity to the Internet exchanges in Wellington and Auckland.

Speed

**Some regions have poor peak speed averages, dipping well below our standard 95% of maximum speed, suggesting capacity constraints are a real problem. There does not appear to be any trend by regional location within New Zealand, such as the distance from the main centres.

However Northland, where the government's fibre rollout has started, has the worst capacity constraint of any region. The Bay of Plenty (mostly Tauranga), Waikato (mostly Hamilton) and the Manawatu/Whanganui (mostly Palmerston North/Whanganui) are also impacted by capacity constraints.

Click for big version.

Webpage Viewing

***Viewing a webpage is a key part of Internet use, so we have compared performance by region for all of New Zealand.

The factor that most often affects the speed at which a webpage downloads is Latency. The more distant a connection is from an ISPs cache, or internet exchange, the more extreme the affect of Latency.

The speed of Webpage viewing is dependent on the time taken for many small files on a webpage to download. The speed at which these small files download is in turn dependent on Latency, which is limited by the speed of light. This is why location of the ISP file storage could be a major factor for webpage viewing times. Some ISPs have file storage centres (caches) in two places, some in just one, but usually only in Wellington or Auckland, rarely in the South Island.

The number of probes for each region shown beside the region names

Click for big version.

We would expect Auckland probes to be the quickest to download our dummy webpage, because most ISPs are located in Auckland and are able to connect to the Internet exchange locally.

Otago (mostly Dunedin) and Canterbury (mostly Chrischurch) are a long way from the Internet exchanges and would be expected to be bottom of this table. Northland being close to Auckland is worse than expected, and combined with the speed tests above, again suggests that capacity is very short to Northland.

The distance to the nearest Internet exchange for Canterbury and Otago could be resolved by ISPs using an Internet exchange in the South Island.

Methodology and Technology Explained

*TrueNet's method of selecting probes ensures that distances to the local exchange equipment are random, enabling fair comparisons between regions and ISPs.

**To compare speed we have included only those regions with 5 or more probes for comment.

***Latency is the time it takes for a tiny file to travel to a remote server and back.

If your region is not represented here, that is because we do not have enough volunteers, sign up here to help [1]. See our last article for details of specifically where we need new volunteers.

________________________________________

Source URL (retrieved on 2012-07-20 11:53): https://www.truenet.co.nz/articles/northland-broadband-short-speed

Links:
[1] https://www.truenet.co.nz/get-involved-become-volunteer-tester

ENDS

© Scoop Media