Broadband performance improving, says Commission

Broadband performance is improving, but there's congestion in the network, says the Commerce Commission

New Zealand's broadband performance improved moderately in the March quarter, the latest quarterly report on broadband quality prepared for the Commerce Commission shows.

At the same time, congestion in key portions of the network continued to have an impact on broadband download speeds, the Epitiro/IDC report said.

That congestion was particularly affecting cities remote from Auckland, which was the aggregation point for international web traffic.

Overall broadband performance improved 4 per cent, but the gap between the best and worst performing internet service providers (ISPs) continued to widen, driven by relatively significant investment in network performance.

New availability measures showed the level of broadband uptime and reliability was "very good", averaging 99.97 per cent in March. That meant an average network downtime of about 14 minutes a month, the report said.

The greatest constraint on broadband download speeds appeared to be congestion in the portion of the network which backhauled traffic from a city exchange to an ISP's network and also between cities.

The backhaul portion of a network includes the link between a Telecom exchange and the service provider's network.

The report said investment in caching solutions, international capacity and backhaul provisioning appeared to be boosting the performance of some service providers, but others were showing increased volatility and little overall improvement.

Caches store popular international and national content locally for quicker access.

Some ISPs had seen a significant rise in speed as a result of changing their data management settings on interleaving, the report said.

Interleaving gave greater stability to broadband performance, particularly over greater distances, but slowed the connection.

"Turning interleaving off as a default setting has provided a significant one-off boost to at least three service providers."

After increased investment and competition in the past year, in the latest quarter a number of ISPs reported their major network upgrades were nearing completion, the report said.

"However the rapid growth in broadband traffic suggests that the focus now will move to optimising the network and provisioning capacity for the quarters to come."

- NZPA