Networking

SpaceX has just won a key grant worth nearly $1bn from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to bring its low-Earth orbit Starlink satellite broadband service to people in 35 US states. 
Elon Musk’s space transportation services company has scooped a sizable chunk of the FCC’s first round of support under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The first phase is worth $9bn, but the total amount allocated to the fund to patch up rural America’s patchy internet is funded to the tune of $16bn over 10 years. 

Networking

SpaceX has been launching about 60 Starlink satellites a month and currently has just under 1,000 orbiting above Earth at an altitude of 500km, or 330 miles. 
The company has frequently promoted its Starlink missions with Falcon 9 rockets with reusable components. FCC chairman Ajit Pai initially expressed doubt whether SpaceX’s Starlink could meet its requirements for a service with a latency below 100ms for a mass-market service. 
SpaceX’s beta service – which opened in October and only services northern parts of the US and southern Canada – has consistently shown it can deliver download speeds from 50Mbps to 150Mbps and latency from 20ms to 40ms. Those speeds and latency beat what’s available to business and residents in rural and remote areas of the US. 
The Starlink public beta service costs $100 a month plus a $499 setup fee for the user terminal, tripod and Wi-Fi router. It’s not known what the cost of the service will be when it’s generally available. 
The RDOF grant will be good news for SpaceX. Elon Musk in May said rocket launches had been reduced to $1m a pop, but noted that the cost of deploying and supporting end-user terminals was the biggest unsolved challenge for Starlink.

The states the FCC granted the most money to deliver SpaceX’s satellite broadband service are Washington with $80m, Montana $73m, Virginia $62m, Pennsylvania $63m, Oregon $58m, Alabama $54m, Idaho $54m, Mississippi $44m, Colorado $40m, Maine $34m, Florida $33m, and Georgia $27m.
SpaceX appears to be the only low-Earth satellite provider that was awarded a grant. The only other low-Earth orbit bidder was Hughes Network Systems, a traditional satellite provider, which invested $50m in a UK government-backed consortium to save financially strapped Starlink rival OneWeb. 
Last month, the FCC granted OneWeb licenses to access the US market for low-Earth orbit broadband satellite services.
The FCC announced SpaceX’s grants as part of the first round of the RDOF, valued at $9.2bn over 10 years. RDOF aims to provide high-speed broadband internet services to 5.2 million unserved homes and businesses. 
The remaining $6.8bn of the $16bn fund will be rolled over into a second auction, the FCC said. 
Ajit Pai, the FCC chairman, who was appointed by outgoing US president Donald Trump, said the auction will be welcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans. 
“We structured this innovative and groundbreaking auction to be technologically neutral and to prioritize bids for high-speed, low-latency offerings,” he said. 
“This auction was the single largest step ever taken to bridge the digital divide.”
More on Elon Musk’s Starlink and internet-beaming satellites More

Qualcomm range test in Italy
Image: Qualcomm
NTT Docomo has turned on carrier aggregation across its 5G networks in Japan on the mid-band n78 and n79 spectrum ranges.
Qualcomm said customers of the telco could hit 5G speeds as high as 4.2Gbps, but the use of a Snapdragon 865 chip is necessary to do so. Devices that have this chip include Samsung Galaxy S20 range, Oppo Find X2, and OnePlus 8.
“This level of service is achieved through 5G sub-6GHz carrier aggregation, which combines a 100MHz carrier in band n78 and a 100MHz carrier in band n79 to boost 5G performance and network capacity using Docomo’s diverse spectrum assets,” Qualcomm said.
“The deployment of 5G Sub6-CA, along with 5G mmWave 28GHz band that Docomo began operating commercially in September, will unleash the full potential of 5G and enable accelerated deployment of Docomo’s 5G service areas.”
The switching on of the sub-6Ghz aggregation is touted as a world first.
Last week, Qualcomm claimed a record for “ultra-broadband long distance speed with 5G technology applied to fixed wireless access”. In short, the company was able to get 1Gbps over a distance of 6.5 kilometres using 26GHz millimetre-wave spectrum and a sizeable fixed antenna.
The test was conducted on Telecom Italia’s live network, and was able to hit 1Gbps using a UDP speed test and 700Mbps for TCP. The Ericsson antenna used had extended range software, and Casa Systems AurusAI customer premise equipment was used to receive the signal.

Qualcomm said the test showed 5G could be used to deliver fast broadband to people without a fixed fibre optic connection.
“Through these new 5G fixed wireless access solutions, called Fiber To The Air, an increasingly widespread and efficient broadband coverage to the entire country,” it said.
The setup will be tested soon by “selected users” around Turin in an area without connectivity before other industrial districts will be tested, Qualcomm said.
Last week, Qualcomm launched its latest mobile device chip, the Snapdragon 888, which the company said will support 5G at millimetre-wave and sub-6GHz frequencies on “all major bands worldwide”. It will also support carrier aggregation, standalone and non-standalone modes, and dynamic spectrum sharing.
Speaking with journalists, Qualcomm SVP and general manager for mobile, compute, and infrastructure Alex Katouzian said that Apple putting Arm chips into laptops was a validation of its approach.
“As we’ve seen during the pandemic age and I think this is going to continue for many years to come, video conferencing and remote working locations are going to become more and more important, which means you have to have the capability of great video conferencing, you have to have the camera capability, you have to have the longevity of the battery, you should be able to work from any place that you are, inside your house or outside your house, and reach your work environment in a secure fashion,” he said.
“All of those things are validation of what we’ve been preaching and I think the strength is going to come from the fact that our partnership with Microsoft is going to be much stronger and extended into the future.
“I think many, many parties realise that the Windows-based ecosystem needs a boost like this, and we’re the partner of choice to make that happen — so, it’s a great opportunity and a great validation for Qualcomm.”
However, recent tests have Apple Silicon thumping the performance currently available on Qualcomm-made processors.
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The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Monday announced that it has allocated $9.2 billion from its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to provide high-speed broadband internet services to 5.2 million unserved homes and businesses.
The telecommunications watchdog touted that only 0.3% of these locations would not receive broadband speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps, and that over 85% are expected to get gigabit-speed broadband.
“I’m thrilled with the incredible success of this auction, which brings welcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans who for too long have been on the wrong side of the digital divide. They now stand to gain access to high-speed, high-quality broadband service,” FCC chairman Ajit Pai said. 
The awards were distributed through a multi-round, descending clock auction format in which bidders indicated in each round whether they would commit to providing services to an area at a given performance tier and latency.   
“This auction was the single largest step ever taken to bridge the digital divide,” Pai said. 
In total, 180 providers yielded an allocation of $9.2 billion out of the $16 billion that was set aside for phase one of the auction. The remaining $6.8 billion that was not allocated will be rolled over into the future phase two auction, the FCC said, which will now have an $11.2 billion kitty to build services in “partially-served areas.”
Among the big winners was SpaceX, which was given $885 million to provide broadband across 643,000 locations in 35 states. 

SpaceX, after launching its 16th Starlink mission last month, currently has 955 satellites in space. The company also has its pilot broadband program, called “Better Than Nothing Beta”, which is available to users in rural and remote parts of northern US and, as of last week, to southern parts of Canada. 
Meanwhile, Charter Communications was assigned the most locations, with just over 1.05 million, and was given $1.22 billion in support. Other big winners were LTD Broadband and Rural Electric Cooperative Consortium, which won $1.3 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively.
The awards will be distributed over the next 10 years in equal monthly payments under the condition that providers meet deployment milestones for bringing broadband services to these rural areas.
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FCC launches $9bn fund to boost rural America’s 5G coverage
The US Federal Communications Commission makes up to $9bn available to close the digital divide in rural America.
Nearly 40% of rural homes globally do not have access to internet: ITU
Which is almost double the inaccessibility compared to urban areas.
SpaceX applies for rural broadband funding, gets ready for next Starlink launch
SpaceX applies for the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, but it still has some obstacles to clear as it gears up to launch another 60 Starlink satellites on Thursday.
Elon Musk: Yes, SpaceX’s Starlink internet will even work on high-speed transportation
SpaceX is also cleared to bid for the FCC’s up to $16bn fund to bring broadband to underserved parts of the US. More

It’s hardly surprising that sales of wi-fi equipment — and particularly mesh networking systems — have soared in recent months. With more and more people now working from home, wi-fi connectivity is required not only for video calls, business email and web browsing, but also to cope with increased demand for online entertainment. 
Price & options 
Most mesh systems are designed for home users, but Netgear’s Orbi Pro is one of the few that specifically caters to the security requirements of business users. The original Orbi Pro was launched back in 2017, so it was certainly due for an update — not least to provide support for the latest WiFi 6 technology (a.k.a. 802.11ax). So, as the name suggests, the new Orbi Pro WiFi 6 brings everything up to date, offering top-of-the-range tri-band WiFi 6 performance with a maximum speed of 6Gbps — 100% faster than the 3Gbps and WiFi 5 (802.11ac) of its predecessor. 
Prices for the Orbi Pro WiFi 6 start at £677.49 (ex. VAT; £812.99 inc. VAT) or $769.99 for the SXK80 model, which is a two-piece system consisting of a primary router and secondary ‘satellite’ unit. This system can cover areas of up to 6000 sq. ft (557 sq. m), with three-piece and four-piece systems also available for larger premises. The original Orbi Pro with 802.11ac wi-fi also remains available, with a price cut to £341.67 (ex. VAT; £409.99 inc. VAT) or $499.99 for businesses with more modest requirements. It’s worth noting, though, that the Orbi Pro WiFi 6 is not compatible with older Orbi products that use 802.11ac. 

The Orbi Pro WiFi6 is a tri-band (1x 2.4GHz, 2x 5GHz) 802.11ax mesh system offering combined maximium throughput of 6Gbps. There are five ports on each of the two units: 2.5Gbps WAN or LAN plus 4x Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)on the router; 2.5Gbps LAN plus 4x GbE on the satellite unit.
Images: Netgear
Design & features 
The original Orbi Pro included several features that set it apart from its more consumer-oriented rivals, including the ability to create three separate networks (SSIDs), each with its own password, for admin staff, employees, and for guests or customers in public locations such as hotels or restaurants.  
To accommodate the trend for working from home, the Orbi Pro WiFi 6 model now adds a fourth network — called ‘IoT’ (Internet of Things) by default — which is specifically designed for small businesses or people working from home. Devices that connect to the IoT network can still use your internet connection, but cannot connect to the wider LAN, effectively creating a barrier to separate your ‘home’ devices from work devices. This ability to isolate groups of devices or users — known as a VLAN (virtual LAN) — is available on all four of the Orbi Pro’s networks, making it possible to create multiple VLAN configurations for different teams or departments within an organisation. 
Like most mesh systems, the Orbi Pro’s main router needs to be connected to an existing broadband modem or router, which it does via a 2.5Gbps Ethernet WAN port. This port can also be used to support high-speed office networks, and there are four additional Gigabit Ethernet ports for devices that need a wired connection. The satellite unit has one 2.5Gbps and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. 
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So, while the Orbi Pro WiFi 6 is clearly an expensive, top-of-the-range solution, its speed and ability to configure multiple networks for different groups of users makes it a good option for many organisations, as well as for business users who are now working from home.
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Last December, you may have wanted faster internet, but you probably didn’t need faster internet. Things change. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic today, we’re working from home, our children are going to school virtually, and we try to keep ourselves from going stir-crazy with streaming media and online games.

So, how much bandwidth do we need for all that? According to John Horrigan, a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, and former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) research director, it’s not a hard number. After all, “not all online activities require the same speeds: For a group video call, 2.5 Mbps speeds suffice, while streaming videos may require 25 Mbps for high-definition quality. How much speed you need, and how you experience that speed, relies on multiple factors, including the applications and the number of people online.”
It’s those last two factors that are making life hard these days. Horrigan said, “Take a common example as the nation responds to the pandemic: If two parents are conducting video meetings while two kids are logged in to online classrooms or trying to watch streaming video at the same time, some may experience slower or interrupted connections, even if they’ve signed up for the fastest home internet service.” 
Then throw in more advanced streaming technologies such as virtual reality (VR) applications, which libraries and schools are increasingly using, which require at least 50 Mbps to work and we’re heading straight into a bandwidth shortage with a gigabit connection. 
As technology journalist Rob Pegoraro reported in Fast Company, “We’re streaming video for work, we’re streaming video for school, and we’re streaming video for entertainment,” said Avi Greengart, Techsponential’s president and lead analyst. “If you have multiple people in your household, these activities get multiplied.” Add in updates and patches for your computers, devices, and games and you’re talking big data.
OpenVault’s OpenVault Broadband Insights Report found that the median broadband usage, a leading indicator of usage growth, rose sharply. Median usage was 233.6 GB, a 60% increase from 146.0 GB during the first quarter of 2019 and up 22% from 190.7 GB at the end of 2019. Importantly, the rate of increase in media growth accelerated to 122% during the first quarter of 2020.
OpenVault also discovered power users, subscribers who use 1 TB or more of data a month, and extreme power users, those who use 2 TB or more, numbers jumped. Power users reached 10% of all users during the first quarter, a 138% increase over the 4.2% who were power users in the year-ago quarter. Extreme power uses were 1.2% of all users last quarter, a 215% increase over the 0.38% who reached that level during the first quarter of last year. 

Take an ordinary household of four. They each own a smartphone, a PC, and a smart speaker. Next, everyone in the house shares two tablets, two gaming consoles, and a pair of 4K TVs. These days, it’s a safe bet everyone’s using these devices a lot. By Broadband’s Now Bandwidth Calculator’s reckoning you should have at least a 180 Mbps connection. Good luck getting that in many places. 
The FCC official broadband definition is only 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. That’s pathetic. Soon to be out of office FCC chairman Ajit Pai wanted to reduce that number to 10 Mbps in 2018. 
Making matters worse, few of us have any real choice in ISPs. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance in its latest Profiles of Monopoly: Big Cable and Telecom report found United States’ largest ISPs: Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier, and Windstream have divided up the country so that  “83.3 million Americans can only access broadband through a single provider.” 
Adding insult to injury, these same providers, with the support of Pai’s FCC, have successfully lobbied 22 state legislatures to outlaw community government ISPs. It’s no wonder that Starlink satellite internet is so eagerly awaited by millions of users. 
if you live out in the country, BroadbandNow Research using the FCC’s data found 42 million don’t even have broadband access at its inadequate standard. 
On top of that, The New America centrist think tank found in its 2020 Cost of Connectivity survey, which was completed before Covid-19 really hit hard, that ISP prices have continued to spiral upward. HowMuch.net has determined that the average US Internet cost is $66.20 per month.

Cable.co.uk noted that, thanks to a “lack of competition in the marketplace … Americans pay far more than they should compared to much of the rest of the world.”  It’s no surprise that Pew Research worked out that half of those who don’t have broadband say it’s because it is too expensive. Prices have only shot up since then. 
Now, things are getting even worse. Data-cap programs for fixed ISPs are now becoming commonplace. Comcast, for instance, will now put a 1.2Terabyte monthly data cap on all its customers in early 2021. 
That may sound like a lot, but let’s look at our family home with four people. With an eight hour day, they’ll use an average of 648 Gigabytes a day, or 1.9 TB a month. Ow. You can pay $10 for every additional 50GB block to a maximum of $100 each month. Our hypothetical family will hit that mark every month. They’d be smarter to avoid the overage charges by spending an extra $30 a month for an unlimited data plan.
Comcast isn’t the only one. AT&T’s millions of DSL subscribers also now must deal with monthly data caps. AT&T intends to kill off its legacy DSL business. This will leave millions of rural users with no broadband at all. Charter/Spectrum is denying that it’ll ask for data caps, but the company has asked the FCC to let it place caps starting in May 2021. Currently, Charter as part of its Time Warner Cable acquisition isn’t allowed to place data caps. 
What can we do? Tom Wheeler, former FCC chairman and visiting fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, thinks we need to finally recognize that the “internet is no longer ‘nice to have,’ it is critical.”
Therefore, Wheeler continued, “The solution to universal broadband in America is not to patch the old program, but to throw it out.” It will cost tens of billions of dollars, but Wheeler wants to see fiber optic everywhere it can be laid. Such projects already exist. The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) gave $4 billion directly to broadband construction of 233 projects across the nation and these projects revitalized dying towns. 
If the major ISPs won’t step up to do the job, Wheeler said, turn to any company or state or local government willing to lay the fiber cable. “The FCC,” he added, “should be their ally, not their opponent.” With this foundation, it will be easier and cheaper to bring broadband to almost every household in the country. 
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Cloudflare has taken the wraps off its Data Localisation Suite, which will allow its customers to control where data goes, and importantly, where it stays.
With countries around the world passing rules that citizen data not leave the country, and concerns of sensitive citizen data being vulnerable to laws of other nations thanks to offshore data stores, Cloudflare said its new tools will allow customers to set where data is encrypted, decrypted, and inspected, as well as in which geography the private keystore is held.
According to Cloudflare Australia chief Raymond Maisano, the way to solve the data sovereignty issue previously had been to have a data centre in that individual country — which obviously is not economical for every business — however that tends to lose the scaling benefits offered by the cloud.
“We’re giving our customers the ability to manage privacy with technology, as opposed to by policy,” Maisano told ZDNet.
“The great advantage of Cloudflare is we’re in 200 points of presence around the world. We have facilities in so many of those countries, and this is really about giving our customers the tools to now be able to leverage those privacy controls and give them the ability to … align to the government policy that states citizen data shouldn’t leave.”
The company already has the functionality to prevent data from transiting to a blocked list of countries, Maisano said, with Cloudflare now looking to offer finer controls than before to limit resources to a location based on a user interaction.
“It’s taken us a while to be able to isolate those workloads … It’s ensuring that we’re adhering to the government policy in the countries where we’re operating,” he said.

“Up until now, the policy piece has been handled in how we want to implement for the service that we have, and now we’re actually deploying it for customers to be more broadly able to control that policy level.”
In order to run its web firewall, Cloudflare said it needs to decrypt and inspect HTTPS traffic in its edge data centres to provide services such as DDoS protection, with customers now able to select where this happens.
Cloudflare added it was introducing its Edge Log Delivery service into early beta testing to allow customers to send logs directly to the point where they are processed, whether that is an on-premise server or a local cloud bucket.
“With this option, customers can still get their complete logs in their preferred region, without these logs first flowing through either our US or EU core data centres,” the company said.
The company also said it was providing functionality to select where its workers would store durable objects.
“Durable objects provide globally consistent state and coordination to serverless applications running on the Cloudflare Workers platform,” it said.
“Jurisdiction restrictions will make it possible for users to ensure that their durable objects do not store data or run outside of a given jurisdiction — making it trivially simple to build applications that combine globalperformance with local compliance. With automatic migration of durable objects, adapting to new rules will be as simple as adding a tag to a set of durable objects.”
In October, the company released its free API Shield product for all its customers to protect APIs exposed to the internet.
Once configured for a server, the shield will deny all incoming connections if they don’t provide a cryptographic certificate and key that the customer has generated.
A month earlier in September, Cloudflare teamed up with the Internet Archive to allow sites that use Cloudflare Always Online to have their pages automatically archived in the Wayback Machine.
When a site goes down, Cloudflare can retrieve the most recently archived version from Internet Archive so that a site’s content can continue to be accessed by users.
According to Internet Archive, more than 468 billion web pages are available via the Wayback Machine to date.
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Image: Asha Barbaschow/ZDNet
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is one of the simplest and easiest ways to prevent email spoofing, which is used by those conducting phishing campaigns or business email compromise scams, by verifying whether an incoming email is actually from the server it purports to be.
As of the end of 2018, only 5.5% of Australian government domains implemented DMARC, but that is set to change.
Thanks to Labor Senators asking seemingly every Australian government agency on the state of DMARC implementations, it is possible to have some idea how much progress has been made.
Of the responses made so far, the most important would be that of the Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS), which provides IT services to a number of other agencies.
On whether DMARC was “fully implemented”, DPS said it wasn’t complete yet, but it had money for the job.
“Implementation of DMARC is funded as part of DPS’ capital budget for 2020-21,” the department said.
Other agencies were more forthcoming, with ASC, formerly known as the Australian Submarine Corporation, stating that it had reached a stage where it honours the DMARC records of others, but had yet to publish its own DMARC DNS record.

Similarly, the Office of the Official Secretary to the Governor-General said its domains were in notification mode thanks to a recent Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) assessment, and the actual implementation was by the “Office’s whole–of-government secure internet gateway provider”.
“The Office acts on advice from ACSC as part of its participation in their Cyber Uplift for Federal Government Systems program. ACSC have recommended that this is an effective mitigation against the threat of phishing emails,” it said.
Another set of agencies, such as the National Australia Day Council, swerved around answering any questions related to DMARC.
“Publicly reporting on individual agency’s compliance with the Essential 8/Top 4 or specific cyber mitigations in response to these questions on notice would provide a snapshot in time of the entire Federal Government’s cyber security maturity and as a result, may provide a heat map for vulnerabilities that malicious actors may exploit and thus increase an agency’s risk of cyber incidents,” the Council said.
A quick check shows the Council does have DMARC turned on.
Agencies were much more evasive on what steps they had taken following the press conference of Prime Minister Scott Morrison in June, where he said Australia was under attack from state-based actors, and said responding to 16 questions on this topic would provide a vulnerability heat map.
One of the usually more secretive agencies, the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), did provide some detail in its response.
“The primary ONI IT systems are accredited to meet PSPF and ISM policy requirements for classified information systems. In addition, these IT systems meet the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Essential 8 security controls to a high maturity level,” it said.
“Subsequent to the ACSC threat reporting of said cyber attack against government systems, and in accordance with the ACSC Cyber Uplift initiatives, ONI conducted a qualitative compliance assessment against the Essential 8 security controls.
“Further details of ONI’s information technology security cannot be provided in an unclassified forum, as it goes to matters of national security.”
ONI reused the last paragraph when avoiding answering whether it had a DMARC record.
Last week, the Department of Parliamentary Services dragged its Parlview tool into the modern age, when it finally dropped the use of Flash.
DPS told ZDNet the new version would reduce the playback delay between its HTML5 real-time stream and Parlview, having additional screen captions, and more accurate searching.
Sayonara Flash Parlview, your playback resetting and browser crashing antics will not be missed.
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Image: ACCC
Thanks to the National Broadband Network (NBN) overprovisioning its plans by between 10% and 15%, it is very likely that customers on NBN’s lowest two fixed-line speed tiers — 12Mbps and 25Mbps — are getting speeds faster than what is on the label.
According to the latest Measuring Broadband Australia report released by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the average speed was 101.2% of the labelled speed across 5,142 tests on 12Mbps lines, and 101.4% of the so-called 25Mbps label across almost 20,000 tests.
“Prior to this change, an NBN100 service would have been provisioned at slightly above 100Mbps plan speed; after protocol overhead, the highest speed test result which we could have measured might have been around 94Mbps,” the report said.
“After the change, the same service might have been provisioned at above 100Mbps plan speed, meaning that even after protocol overheads we might still measure speeds around or slightly above 100Mbps. The increase in CVC has meant that there is sufficient capacity for RSPs to deliver speeds that are very close to the maximum set download speed.”
However, as the speeds increased, the percentages dropped. For 50Mbps, it dropped to 95.2% on average and went down to 94.5% in busy hours, and for 100Mbps the drops were more severe, 95% overall and 94.1% in busy hours, respectively. 
Overall, a majority of tests conducted for the report now sit at over 100%, with a plurality being over 105% of the plan speed.
At the 50Mbps speed tier, the ACCC reported fibre to the curb was able to outperform a full fibre connection, but once the speeds were lifted to 100Mbps, fibre to the premise was the only technology to clear 100%. HFC got close and it did surpass the 100% mark once underperforming lines were excluded.

Once again, there was little good news for fibre-to-the-node (FttN) users, even as the percentage of underperforming services dropped to sit at 8%.
“Within the 50/20Mbps NBN speed tier, fibre to the node services had an average download speed around 5Mbps lower than other technologies,” the report said. “Within the 100Mbps NBN speed tiers, fibre-to-the-node services had an average download speed around 17 Mbps lower than other technologies.”
Even on the overprovisioning front, the report said FttN fell short.
“Following the higher incidence of over-provisioning, all technology/plan combinations have seen an increase in download performance. Fibre to the node services on the NBN100 plan saw a relatively modest 1.9 percentage point increase in download performance, whereas other technology/plan combinations saw increases ranging from 7.1 to 10.0 percentage points,” it said.
Telstra previously spun the increases in artificial capacity restriction as a speed boost, although in its defence, the telco is now advertising it can hit the labelled speed at all periods through the day, and managed to hit 103% of advertised speeds in busy hours.
All other telcos advertise in a range between 79% of plan speed for Exetel, up to 90% for Optus — however Optus is able to hit just shy of 105% in the test, meaning it is still the fastest telco on average.
At the other end of the table, MyRepublic continues to have far and away the worst latency on offer at 21.1ms in busy periods, with Superloop taking the title of telco with the lowest latency at 10ms, followed by Aussie Broadband at 10.1 in busy hours.
“It should be noted that latency at even 30ms would have a detrimental effect on only the most latency-sensitive applications and would be unlikely to be noticed by an end user,” the report said.
The ACCC also released its latest quarterly update on Friday, which included the performance of fixed wireless connections for the first time. Users on fixed wireless have the choice of a 25Mbps plan, or a best effort 25-50Mbps service dubbed Fixed Wireless plus.
“During all hours, performance of the 25Mbps plan is more stable with a daily average value of around 20Mbps. During busy hours, performance of both plans is lower and variability in daily performance is slightly higher,” the update said.
“The Fixed Wireless Plus plan shows an increase in average speed, increasing from a daily average value of 35Mbps at the beginning of August to an average of around 40Mbps at the end of October.”

Average daily fixed wireless download speeds during all hours
Image: ACCC
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