The Australian Competition and Consumer Council, (ACCC), has vowed to take action against (ISP), an Internet service provider that misleads customers about the speed of its national broadband network, (NBN).
But how do you know your NBN plan is good? How do you know you got the promise from the supplier?
NBN is building infrastructure that will allow 5.7 million households to connect to the network via fiber optic, hybrid cables, wireless or satellite.
But to connect to the Internet, you have to deal with one of the nearly 150 ISP.
Rod Sims, president of ACCC, says the industry is healthy and competitive. But he also said many customers were "confused about the broadband speed of advertising," while the industry "isn't consistent in providing clear and accurate information."
So ensuring that ISP does not mislead consumers at network speed is crucial for ACCC.
The Australian market is very different from the UK, where Ofcom, the regulator, actively provides accurate information that allows consumers to compare their services.
Australia, on the other hand, provides information to consumers through the protection of consumer law and by encouraging industry self-regulation.
The user experience depends on a series of factors related to the quality of transmission, which are reflected in the speed and delay of the connection to exchange information over the Internet.
A basic way to test the speed of a network is to measure the time it takes to send a file from the server. This result is often reflected in Mbps.
Many ISP, including Telstra, Optus and iiNet, offer Internet speed testing to their customers.
But the speed measured in this way reflects the speed from ISP to the client. And you may experience it at a much slower rate than the "peak" advertised by ISP.
In order to get a better understanding of your speed, you should also use another speed test service in addition to the ISP recommended method.
And you should repeat the test at different times of the day and keep the details of the test results.
The popular speed tests are as follows:
At present, many ISP provide faster download speed, as well as relatively slow upload speed. Because many users often download the same content, the network can be optimized to provide faster speed.
But users may also upload specific content, such as uploading your photos to a social media account or storing and uploading your files to the cloud.
This upload has no scale effect, so it is slower.
Because cloud storage and streaming media have become more common, our demands are changing.
Many users now want to upload and download the speed of the network can be similar.
In Australia, the theoretical maximum NBN speed for fiber-optic links is 100Mbps. In fact, Australia has five layers of NBN links, from level 1 (12Mbps download; 1Mbps upload) to level 5 (100Mbps download 40Mbps upload).
But testing often comes at a slower rate than ISP has promised.
There are many reasons for this. It can be a problem with the house and the NBN network, or it can be a delay within the ISP network or a problem with too many users.
It is possible that due to the underinvestment of the relevant stakeholders, the ability of the network can not be guaranteed with the increase of users, which leads to the delay of the speed of the network.
Your experience may vary at different times of the day, as well as from ISP to ISP. In the 24-hour interval, the number of users may vary greatly, resulting in different network congestion.
This results in different periods of time of network speed differences, different suppliers to provide different network speed.
Many ISP advertise their typical speed, but in Australia there is no law requiring them to indicate a range of minimum and maximum speeds.
If you think your NBN is too slow, much slower than promised, you should contact ISP.
If they can't solve it, you should report it to ACCC. To improve information on broadband, ACCC is spending A $7 million to test NBN speeds on a trial basis, and they want consumers to provide information.
Australia should have anticipated the Internet speed problem and set up a broadband performance reporting framework under which service providers can use NBN infrastructure to provide services to consumers.
(ACCAN), the Australian communications consumer action network, has been calling for such a program to check ISP's performance. But so far it has not come true.
So you have to monitor the speed of the NBN as a consumer, and there are persistent issues like the ACCC report, which they want to release ISP speed and performance data from later this year.