NBN Co, the company building Australia’s National Broadband Network, says the latest Akamai State of the Internet connectivity report demonstrates the need to complete the rollout of the NBN network as soon as possible.
And, NBN Co has once again reiterated previous statements on “the importance of understanding what the report is detailing, which is average speeds delivered at a point in time across 10 million services most of which are old ADSL services - not the actual speeds the NBN network can deliver”.
As reported by iTWire, Akamai put Australia at 51st globally for mobile and fixed internet speeds – and now leading the Asia-Pacific region for average mobile internet speeds at 13.8Mbps.
“But it (Australia) has a way to go with an average of 10.1Mbps for fixed broadband,” said iTWire colleague Ray Shaw.
{loadposition petrer}As Akamai said in its report: "We tend to forget that Australia is currently building an Internet network across an entire continent. Providing fast, reliable mobile and fixed internet to a vast rural population of this scale is a challenge that no other country must deal with. It is hard to compare Australia’s speeds to a small and densely populated country like Singapore for example, where a single switch provides hundreds of thousands of people with the Internet.”
In the statement issued by NBN Co the company said, “NBN is connecting new users at the fastest rate yet ever seen in Australia. With more than 4.2 million homes able to order a service over the NBN network and 1.8 million having signed up already, NBN is moving at an ever increasing pace. Currently more than 23,000 new homes are signing up and connecting to a service over the NBN network each week. This is up from 10,700 homes per week last year.”
According to NBN Co the Akamai report “does demonstrate the positive impact NBN is having over time”.
“In just over three years, the number of active end users on the NBN network has gone from less than one per cent of households to more than 15% connected. Over the same period, average speeds measured by Akamai have more than doubled,” NBN Co says.
“In Akamai’s first quarter report in 2013, the average speed delivered in Australia was 4.7 Megabits per second, while today’s report for the fourth quarter 2016 shows the average speed delivered of 10.1 Megabits per second.
“With almost two million homes and businesses now accessing fast broadband over the NBN network, and multiple thousands more connecting every day, we expect average speeds delivered to improve.”
NBN Co maintains it is important to clarify that average speeds delivered and measured by Akamai are “limited by consumers’ purchasing behaviour and retailer network dimensioning”.
“Today, 80% of premises in Australia are ordering an NBN speed tier of 25 Megabits per second or less. We expect this to increase over time as both consumer demand and applications requiring faster broadband grow.
“Australia is now 51st in the world in terms of average connection speeds delivered at 10.1 Megabits per second, which is a 24 per cent increase year on year.”