NBN Co's 2Gbps services are too fast for ACCC to monitor

NBN Co's new 2Gbps residential internet plans are too fast to be monitored with SamKnows boxes for the competition watchdog's speed testing program.

Image credit: SamKnows

The so-called 'home hyperfast' plans, sold as 2000/200Mbps for FTTP and 2000/100Mbps for HFC, were launched in mid-September.

A spokesperson for NBN Co told iTnews that as of December 10, it had 11,000 orders for 2Gbps services on its books.

While a boon for bandwidth-hungry consumers, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) revealed this week that it has a limited ability to monitor the quality and performance of these very high-speed NBN connections under its 'Measuring Broadband Australia' program.

Field testing hardware devices used by the program, manufactured by SamKnows, can’t measure data transmission speeds greater than 1Gbps.

This means the ACCC's testing can no longer keep pace with the capacity of NBN Co’s very high-speed service tiers.

The SamKnows devices connect to home internet gateway equipment using gigabit ethernet connections which places an upper limit on the end-to-end link where SamKnows monitors speeds, the ACCC said in a report.

The designers of the NBN monitoring program expect – once network protocol overheads are deducted – the highest speeds that they will be able to observe won’t exceed 940Mbps.

"The NBN home hyperfast residential speed tier ... services do not feature in our reporting as the whiteboxes deployed by the program cannot measure these speeds,” the report states.

An ACCC spokesperson told iTnews that it had identified 38 services enrolled for monitoring that were now on the hyperfast tier and could not be measured.

The ACCC said that it had “no immediate plans” to replace the whitebox devices, which are supplied by Cisco. Cisco bought SamKnows in 2023.

However, it said it would review its plans, contingent on assessing its current funding for the program and on the growth of hyperfast subscriptions.

"The ACCC is unable to measure the rate at which this cohort of services is growing until we have collected data for the next monitoring period," the spokesperson told iTnews.

“We will continue to review our plans, taking into account the Measuring Broadband Australia program’s ongoing funding from the federal government and the overall demand for the NBN Hyperfast product."

NBN Co's official current figures are that more than 9.8 million homes and businesses are capable of accessing multi-gigabit wholesale speeds.

The network operator has been highly active in promoting its achievements in the deployment of its high-speed service tiers of late.

In a recent blog post published December 1, it wrote that it had 9500 wholesale orders on its books for 2Gbps services.

That means that it in the last 18 days it has received an additional 1500 orders or roughly 80 new orders per day.

The ACCC’s Measuring Broadband Australia program was established to monitor user experience against service level claims by retail service providers.