Rural Broadband - the Poor Country Cousin

February 2015 Broadband Report

2015-03-20

Rural Broadband - the Poor Country Cousin

The Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) funded by Government is having an immense impact, halving download times for upgraded connections, but still not as good as urban broadband.

Older rural ADSL connections take more than twice as long to load webpages than RBI upgraded connections, and approaching 3 times that of Urban services.

Summary of Performance Measures

In February 2015, Orcon is the standout ISP with top performances for both Fibre, and ADSL services.

Orcon Fibre100Mb/s now leads with the fastest time to download NZ Live Webpages, overtaking Snap for the first time since November 2014. Snap leads with downloading Australian Live Webpages.

Significantly, there is now very little difference in performance between all the Fibre 100 & 30Mb/s services for Live New Zealand located webpage downloads. This is not yet true of Australian webpages, where some ISPs take 50% longer than others.

For VDSL, Vodafone remains dominant for NZ Live Webpage downloads followed by Orcon, but for Australian webpagesVodafone, BigPipe and Orcon are equal best.

For ADSL services, Orcon takes the top spot, overtaking Slingshot for time to download NZ Live Webpages. This is a significant achievement as Slingshot has dominated the ADSL performance statistics for this particular measurement since November 2014.

TrueNet changed focus in February 2014 from Speed performance to Webpage performance. In twelve months the performance range between ISPs has improved as has the actual performance. Most broadband connections in New Zealand use ADSL services so it’s important to note that the ADSL performance parameters for time to download NZ Live Webpages have narrowed considerably since November 2014, when the range from best to worst was 4.7 to 6.2 seconds. In February 2015 the range is now 3.7 to 4.7 seconds. These measurements show a big improvement in download times as well as a narrowing between best and worst results.

Speed by Time of day consistency has proved to be more volatile, although ADSL, VDSL & 50Mb/s Cable have consistent 9PM download speeds.

There were changes in high speed Cable and Fibre averages this month, where Cable evening performance slowed from 109Mb/s in January, to 89Mb/s in February. Vodafone 100Mb/s Fibre service is slowly improving with November 9pm results of 35Mb/s, and February results now 49Mb/s.

Our Quarterly feature is Rural Broadband this month. No surprises that the rural sector experiences a lower performance compared with the urban sector . Rural ADSL averages less that half the speed of urban users at 9pm. Rural connections take over 2.5 times longer to download the Live Webpages in our tests.

As should be expected, RBI funded ADSL connections fare better at downloading Live Webpages, and experience less impact on performance during the 9pm busy period than yet to be upgraded Rural ADSL.

Full report: February 2015 Broadband Report | TrueNet - The broadband monitors

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