The Commerce Commission has released its report on New Zealand broadband quality covering the period 1 July to 31 December 2009. The report examines the quality of broadband services provided by New Zealand's internet service providers (ISPs). The report aims to provide a comparison of the optimal technical performance of ISPs in delivering broadband services in the major New Zealand cities.

"The focus of the report is on web browsing speeds because web browsing is the most common activity undertaken by internet users," said Dr Ross Patterson, Telecommunications Commissioner.

Since the beginning of 2009, the cities tested, Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, have shown an improvement in national web browsing speed. There has been a more significant improvement in international web browsing speed. The main reason for that improvement is the increased use by ISPs of caching techniques, which is the local storage of international content and therefore bringing content closer to end-users.

National web browsing speeds are good in Auckland but slow markedly the further away test sites are from Auckland. This decline in speed appears to be caused by ISPs generally locating key equipment in Auckland. Domain Name Server (DNS) response times increase further from Auckland, contributing to the slowing of web browsing speeds.

Web browsing speeds over the course of a day vary considerably among ISPs. Some ISPs are managing to keep their variation in web browsing speed within reasonable bounds while others have considerably slower speeds at peak times.

"The Commission's intention with the report is that ISPs will be able to see their relative performance against their competitors in different locations and identify methods to improve that performance for the benefit of consumers," said Dr  Patterson. "To help achieve this, the Commission has developed a range of what it considers achievable performance benchmarks to replace the index that had been used in previous reports."

These benchmarks include web browsing speeds, variability of speed throughout the day and the availability of service. Performance against the benchmarks identifies considerable room for improvement.

The full report is available on the Commission's website www.comcom.govt.nz/broadband-reports

Background

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.

This broadband quality report is part of a continuing series measuring broadband performance. The Commerce Commission has undertaken the analysis of the underlying data provided by Epitiro.  The report does not identify individual ISPs. However, the Commission is considering naming ISPs in future reports.

Epitiro Technologies Limited 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-Iâ„ ¢ 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.