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The latest testing by TrueNet suggests the Southern Cross Cable - or at least ISPs' willingness to buy bandwidth on our only major broadband connection to the outside world - is a bottleneck as UFB fibre boosts domestic speed.
In a simple test of the time taken to download a web page hosted in NZ, homes with UFB fibre were five times faster than those with ADSL (the most common type of copper broadband).
But with downloading websites from Australia and the US, it was much more even-stevens.
TrueNet principal John Butt agrees the Southern Cross Cable monopoly is likely a factor, but says latency (or lag) with international connections also smoothes out the results.
Against expectations, the hybrid fibre cable (HFC) connections run by Vodafone in parts of Wellington and Christchurch (inherited from TelstraClear) are faster than fibre for downloading the test page based in the US.
"I don't know about the cable, but one could speculate that it is due to peering, although that would mean better peered in the US compared to Sydney, which is the opposite to what I would have expected for TelstraClear. I am at a loss to answer that one," Mr Butt told NBR.
Before it was bought by Vodafone, TelstraClear was famously hostile to peering (network interconnection) arrangements with other ISPs, meaning its NZ data traffic sometimes had to take a round trip to the US before reaching its destination.
TrueNet, one of two Commerce Commission-appointed broadband See Mr Butt's blog on the latest results below.
Fibre Performance Outstrips the Competition
The government sponsored fibre installation project (UFB or Ultra Fast Broadband) is very much faster at downloading web pages than other technologies in New Zealand.
Fibre Performs Best
TrueNet compared identical test webpages from New Zealand, Australia and the United States with the homepage of Trade Me, to provide a ranking of technologies for downloading webpages during the evening busy hour (9pm-10pm).
Performance of webpage downloads show that Fibre customers not only receive fast file downloads as reported in our April report, but they also have very quick website downloads. Unexpectedly, Cable and ADSL customers are receiving very slow webpage downloads in NZ.
TrueNet compared three sites with the same standard testpage on each site; a 300kB page made up of pictures and text, very like a relatively small page found on many sites. A copy of this page can be found on our website here. To provide a comparison, we put these alongside the results of Trademe's live, ~500kB, homepage.
The four sites tested include:
- NZ - TrueNet's testpage located in Auckland and Wellington
- Australia - Testpage on a Sydney server
- USA - Testpage on a Dallas, Texas server
- Trademe - Trademe homepage located on Trademe servers in Auckland & Wellington
The Trademe homepage is quite different to TrueNet's standard testpage, it is live and changes very frequently. It is larger with many photos, and some smart technologies Trademe uses to speed up the download.
The chart is sorted by the time taken to download the New Zealand standard webpage.
FS = fullspeed
The standard NZ webpage takes five times as long to download on ADSL as it does on Fibre, and the same webpage in Australia takes twice as long on ADSL as it does on Fibre.
VDSL performance in NZ is almost comparable with Fibre, only international performance is a bit slower.
An unexpected result for urban technologies is the performance of Cable when downloading the standard page. From Australia it has the poorest performance, but from the USA it ranks the best.
Chris Keall
Tue, 04 Jun 2013
Tue, 04 Jun 2013
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TrueNet testing suggests Southern Cross Cable is roadblock on UFB performance
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