Credit: NBN
Telstra and MyRepublic have been rapped by Australia’s consumer watchdog for their lacklustre fixed-line NBN service during peak periods.
According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the two retail services providers (RSPs) were the RSPs most affected by the under-performing services during the hours of 7pm to 11pm.
Vocus brands Dodo and iPrimus alongside Exetel were also cited for failing to “often” meet their advertised NBN speed claims.
The report added that consumers experienced an outage of more than 30 seconds every one to two days.
Across the board, most of the RSPs’ download and upload speeds decreased slightly during the busy hours compared to the previous quarter, the ACCC’s Measuring Broadband Australia report noted.
As such, 12.4 per cent of 1,095 consumers surveyed experienced under-performing services that “rarely” came close to reaching their maximum plan speed.
The only telcos said to have seen improvements to busy evening service speeds were, despite its general under-performance, MyRepublic and Optus.
According to the ACCC, the slower download and upload speeds are likely to be impacting consumers’ use of streaming, telecommuting, online gaming and using cloud services, for example to store or share photos and videos.
“We now want to see more action from both NBN Co and RSPs to help the more than one in ten connections that simply do not perform to their plan speed,” ACCC chair Rod Sims said.
“In many cases, these limited speeds are caused by in-home wiring issues that can be fixed with a visit from a technician.”
Simms added that the ACCC would “discuss” whether Dodo, iPrimus and Extels’ advertised speed claims should be immediately revised following the results.
Report details revealed that fibre to the node (FTTN) connections were among the worst affected by the slower speeds, with the majority of consumers having paid for NBN50 or NBN100 plans.
Meanwhile, fibre to the curb (FTTC) connections achieved 88.9 per cent of maximum plan download speeds, with similar results being noted for fibre to the premises (FTTP) connections and HFC, all “significantly above” results for FTTN.
A Telstra spokesman told ARN the telco's inclusion on the ACCC list stemmed from its move to upgrade a million NBN25 nbn customers onto the NBN50 speed tier for free.
"While most customers benefited from the upgrade, about 20 per cent were unable to achieve the maximum download speeds of that higher speed tier (NBN tier 50) due to limitations of their NBN connection," he said.
