Second report on broadband quality

Commerce Commission releases second report on broadband quality

Commerce Commission Chair Paula Rebstock said, "The Commission is pleased to note that the report indicates there was an overall improvement in the June quarter in the performance of the five largest ISPs."

"This is a very promising signal that the regulatory interventions being taken to encourage competitive prices, better quality and incentives to invest are beginning to have an effect," said Ms Rebstock.

This quarter, figures relating to Telstra Clear Limited have been broken down to more accurately reflect their services.

The report is designed to provide New Zealand consumers, businesses and industry observers with objective data on how the quality of broadband services is changing over time in the chosen locations. The results should be viewed as indicative rather than representative of broadband performance across the country.

It should be noted that this report forms part of an ongoing data series that, over time, will provide valuable information on service performance, but does not provide a complete picture at this early stage in the series.

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

Background

The Commission contracts Epitiro to provide the broadband quality reports. As part of Epitiro's work in the area, Epitiro provides services to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) enabling them to benchmark customer performance across dial up, cable, broadband and wireless connections.

The ISP-Iâ„¢ platform and technology from Epitiro emulates an Internet user's activity across eleven sites in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. It measures twelve ISPs every fifteen minutes on a 24-hour basis across the eleven sites. The platform gathers a range of detailed statistics on eight parameters - synchronisation speed, cached and non-cached HTTP download speeds, ping, connection speed, reliability, DNS and packet loss and email delivery times for independent analyses.

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, including reporting on the quality of broadband services.

ENDS

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