NZ broadband getting faster, but overseas links still miserable

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The average New Zealand broadband connection is getting faster, the Commerce Commission’s July-December 2010 Report on NZ Broadband Quality found.

The report, released today, said the maximum DSL (that is, copper line) broadband speed increased from 5.5Mbit/s in July to 6.5Mbit/s in December.

Coming fibre connections will boost download speeds to up to 100Mbit/s.

Telecom’s Chorus division is close to completing a major fibre to the node/roadside cabinet upgrade, which has brought fibre closer to homes, and reduced the amount of distance covered by slower copper wires. The roll-out’s aim is to bring 10Mbit/s or faster DSL connections to 80% of the country. All indications are that that’s the case – at least on a technical level. Not everybody is willing to shell out for the most expensive broadband plans. Congestion at peak times is another problem.

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Slower life beyond the Bombay Hills
The commission found, once again, that geography is destiny.

The fastest web browsing speeds are enjoyed by Aucklanders. Auckland is the home of the most domain name server (DNS) infrastructure, and the landing point for the Southern Cross Cable, New Zealand’s only fibre optic link with the outside world.

Miserable international connection
And once again, the commission reported miserable speed for international content.

Without caching (storing some frequently-accessed files locally to speed access) average international web browsing speed to the commission’s test site was around 0.5Mbit/s.

With caching, international web browsing speed was around 2Mbit/s.

School's out = slow internet
Another familiar theme: our easily-overloaded copper networks get slow when school breaks for the day, and keep getting slower, with traffic reaching its most congested around 9pm.

Most and least downtime
All ISPs in the survey fell below the Commission’s 99.9% uptime benchmark (which equates to 43.2 minutes of downtime a month).

TelstraClear, Telecom and Vodafone had uptime of 99.95%-99.6%; Orcon (99.2%) and CallPlus/Slingshot (99.02% or 345 minutes a month when a web page cannot be downloaded) trailed the pack.

VoiP, video testing on the way
The Commerce Commission is required to monitor broadband quality on a regular basis under section 9A of the Telecommunications Act.

The commission also announced today that it will expand its 2011 reporting with measures to test  VoiP capability and video streaming