Optus most likely RSP to suffer a fixed-line outage

Optus fixed-line internet is more than three times as likely to suffer an outage than rival internet service providers, according to a report by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

The competition watchdog released its Measuring Broadband Australia report today (May 7th) and for the first time covered the average number of outages that lasted more than 30 seconds for each major retail service provider (RSP) of NBN services.

Each RSP was able to keep its number of daily outages below 0.5 with the exception of Optus, which reached just under 1.6 outages per day in February.

The report didn't include outages between midnight and 6AM, when RSPs are more likely to conduct maintenance operations.

The report also broke out a handful of other statistics on the performance of Australia's internet service providers.

The average download performance for each telco was just that –average – with only 6.4 percent difference between the slowest and fastest RSP.

TPG had the fastest overall speed, achieving 89 percent of a plan's maximum speeds overall, and 88.3 percent during the busiest hours between 7PM and 11PM. MyRepublic had the lowest overall speed with 82.6 percent, while a combined Dodo & iPrimus scored the lowest for busy hours with 81.9 percent.

Overall though, download speeds improved by just over one percent compared to the November quarter.

As for latency, pings increased by approximately 5ms for under-performing services, which are classified as connections that cannot reach download speeds even close to what was advertised due to physical limitations.

Most internet providers measured up with around the same average latency between 10.7ms (Telstra) and 17ms (MyRepublic) excluding under-performing services, and slightly higher for under-performing services. The one exception was iiNet though, which clocked 30.6ms for under-performing services.

The report noted that these latency levels would usually have no discernible effect for most web browsing or VoIP calls. In iiNet's case though, most VoIP services use a latency buffer of 25 – 30ms to mitigate latency, so some iinet users could be experiencing lag during calls if their service is under-performing.