The Commerce Commission has released its report on New Zealand broadband quality for the three months to June 2009. The report examines the quality of broadband services provided by New Zealand's internet service providers (ISPs). The data has been collected by independent benchmarking consultant Epitiro from central sites using premium residential plans.

Telecommunications Commissioner Dr Ross Patterson said, "The report shows steady improvement in average broadband performance, a trend that has continued since the Commission started monitoring broadband performance at the beginning of 2008. Increased investment seems to have been a primary driver of these quality improvements. Further investment will be necessary to continue this trend, particularly through the use of caching and similar proven performance enhancing measures."

Other findings included:

  • The availability of broadband services measured has improved since the last report, with Telecom managing to achieve better than 99.99 per cent internet availability throughout May. Snap, TelstraClear Cable, Woosh and WorldxChange managed to match this achievement with better than 99.99 per cent internet availability in July.
  • Interleaving continues to have a major impact on the performance of the plans being tested, with speeds being boosted significantly when interleaving is turned off. Interleaving provides greater stability to broadband performance over longer lines, but decreases speed. All the ISPs tested now allow customers to request that interleaving be turned off or have adopted a policy of automatically turning off interleaving for particular plans.
  • Performance was generally better the closer the test site was to Auckland, where most web traffic is routed. National browsing speeds for the best ISPs reached 6Mbps in Auckland, but declined with distance from Auckland city (apart from Hamilton), to little more than 3Mbps in Dunedin. The Commission understands that some ISPs are putting in place new backhaul arrangements for South Island cities which may improve browsing speeds.

The quarterly report is designed to provide New Zealand consumers, businesses and industry observers with independent measurements of the changes in the quality of broadband services over time. The results should be viewed as the optimal broadband changes in performance that can be achieved in each of the main centres in which measurements are taken. The performance of unbundled lines is not yet being reported.

The full report is available on the Commission's website www.comcom.govt.nz under Market Monitoring.

 

Background

This broadband quality report is part of a continuing series measuring changes in broadband performance over time. Previously, Epitiro, together with IDC, published this report on contract for the Commission using its ISP-IÂâ„ ¢ platform and proprietary index and methodologies. With this report, the Commission has undertaken the analysis of the index results and underlying data provided by Epitiro.

Interleaving is a method of transmitting data over a DSL connection that corrects transmission faults and provides stability. However, this process can slow download speeds. It was designed to increase the reliability of connections a long way from the exchange, but it is of less value to users who are close to an exchange and have good quality transmission.

Caching stores international (and sometimes national) website content locally, which enables users of that content to download it at national speeds which are generally much faster than international speeds.

Epitiro Technologies Ltd is a company with experience in internet performance benchmarking. The Commerce Commission contracts Epitiro to provide the data for these broadband quality reports. As part of Epitiro's work in the area, Epitiro also provides services to internet service providers (ISPs) enabling them to benchmark customer performance across dial up, cable, broadband and wireless connections.

The ISP-IÂâ„ ¢ platform and technology from Epitiro emulates an internet user's activity across eleven sites. The sites are located in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. It measures twelve ISPs every fifteen minutes on a 24-hour basis across the eleven sites. The platform gathers a range of detailed statistics on seven parameters - synchronisation speed, cached and non-cached HTTP download speeds, ping, DNS, packet loss and email delivery times for independent analyses.

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) is a data communications technology that allows broadband to be delivered over a copper line. ADSL1is an early standard, with theoretical download speeds of up to 8Mbps and typical rates below 5Mbps. ADSL2+ is a newer and faster standard that can deliver a theoretical download speed of up to 24Mbps, with users typically experiencing between 8Mbps and 15Mbps. However DSL performance is highly dependent on how far the signal has to travel over the copper connection to the home - the greater the distance to the local telephone exchange, the slower the speed. Other factors like the nature of the broadband plan, the modem, the quality of computer and home wiring also affect the user's experience.

Amendments to the Telecommunications Act 2001 have explicitly empowered the Commerce Commission to monitor the performance of telecommunications markets and report on this work. Accordingly, the Commission has been producing regular monitoring reports, including reporting on the quality of broadband services.