October Monthly Broadband Report

October Monthly Broadband Report

[Full report with graphs: October Monthly Broadband Report | TrueNet - The broadband monitors]

2012-11-14

Vodafone Slips to Last in TrueNet Speed Comparison

Speed comparisons for October show Vodafone well behind the industry in providing consistent speed performance throughout the day.

TelstraClear Cable is best for Webpage downloads while Vodafone, Slingshot & TelstraClear remain equal best for ADSL webpage downloads.

Capped vs Unlimited Services

For DSL services, it is common to limit the data available in each month with a data "Cap". A less known service on the market is broadband without a data limit, called "Unlimited".

Slingshot have provided an Unlimited data service for some time now, but recently Orcon & Compass have launched similar services. Unlimited services encourage greater use of the Internet, and ISPs warn that they may restrict performance if data demand exceeds capacity. TrueNet has decided that for performance monitoring we will treat these markets separately to identify how much restriction occurs.

TrueNet is keen to have a few more Orcon Unlimited customers volunteer to create a viable comparison to Slingshot.

Speed

Capped Market

Most ISPs have improved peak Time-of-Day (ToD) speeds since TrueNet monitoring began 12 months ago. Where TrueNet once reported only 3 ISPs with stand out top performances, October monitoring now has 3 ISPs with stand out poor performances.

Maxnet have improved performance from the worst ToD speed which was just 70% of peak performance last month to a more credible 85% in October, while the critical 8pm ToD performance is almost in line with the industry at 90%.

Vodafone has slipped to last this month down from 83% to a very poor 78% of peak performance.

Unlimited Market

Capped services are offered by ISPs with the intention of providing full capacity during peak periods. Unlimited data services are offered with a warning of possible managed speeds during peak hours. The market for Unlimited plans is widening with Orcon recently starting a new service to compete with Slingshot. ISPs group Unlimited customers into "Pools" to enable them to manage peak performance. We plan to separately report these plans as they represent a very different market.

We had 5 Orcon Unlimited probes working during October, and one Compass Unlimited probe with only a few days of tests. These are not quite enough for reporting a comparison with the 17 Slingshot Unlimited probes.

Despite potentially managing this service during peak periods, Slingshot continues to provide a better ToD performance compared to Vodafone's standard capped service.

Webpage

In October, nearly all ISPs show a small increase in median time to download the page.

There was a big change in webpage download performance for Telecom with their median time to download the testpage doubling from 0.5s to 1 second.

TelstraClear Cable remains the best webpage download performer overall.

Slingshot Capped, Vodafone and TelstraClear demonstrate the best webpage downloading for DSL this month.

Glossary

Details on how we measure are avalable on our Technical page

Speed - Throughput or the peak speed achieved during our standard test downloading an image from our test servers

Webpage Download - TrueNet maintains a Standard Testpage which is used for measuring the time to download the entire page. This page is visible here, we use a copy located on our test servers for test downloads.

ISPs - TrueNet has probes measuring almost 20 ISPs but only reports on those where there are 5 or more probes working during any particular month.

ADSL, VDSL, DSL - the standard broadband service provided over a telephone line, VDSL is a faster version than ADSL. They use similar technology and backhaul, so sometimes DSL is used when referring to both.

Unlimited - A service where there is no monthly limit on the amount of data used. Specifications for this service include that it may be "Managed" and have performance reductions applied during peak demand periods.

ENDS

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