If you look at the nbn website, you’ll see just 3 speed tiers, but at least 1 Australian ISP are offering new, faster plans. Those plans are a mega 200Mbps down.. but better than that, they’re symmetrical, so 200Mbps up as well.
The new plans are, well, still new and only as recently as yesterday did we finally get real-world usage data to see what’s possible on the fastest consumer NBN plans in the country.
User buba013 on Whirlpool posted their results. We all understand that even with FTTP that we shouldn’t expect 200Mbps, so the question is how much less can users expect. In this result, the Victoria-based test, using the server in Melbourne, achieved 116.9Mbps down and even more, 167 Mbps up with a tiny 3ms latency using Chrome on Windows 10.
Update
Since I posted about the speed test from buba013, SkyMesh have worked some more magic to make the connection even better. The latest speedtest is a mega 189.71 Mbps down and 184.56 Mbps up. Seriously for a home connection, those speeds would make many small-to-medium businesses green with envy.
For those like myself still stuck on an ADSL2 connection, upload speeds are less than 1Mbps, often 0.7-0.8Mbps. At more than 180x the speed, this means you (and everyone else in your house) could use the internet however they want, at the same time and never face buffering of any kind. One of the biggest challenges is streaming uninterrupted video, while someone else is backing up their data to the cloud. Having not just enough bandwidth, but bandwidth with lots of headroom mean you’re not waiting for the internet and you get back time in your life, the most valuable asset of all.
This speed doesn’t come cheap, starting at a cost of $269.95pm, for that, you will get 240GB of anytime data, which isn’t much, but the off-peak data is mega, at a giant 32TB. If you can split the cost with some flat mates and schedule most of your downloads overnight, this may be the best internet money can buy in Australia right now.
around $300/month is too much. I’m in city centre so I can get privateer fibre for $400/month much faster.