Australia: a broadband backwater?

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 00:25

IT Industry - Market

The latest analysis of Australian broadband services by Epitiro shows that connectivity to the rest of the world leaves much to be desired.

Epitiro found that international ping times to the USA, UK and Japan for all ISPs tested averaged 176ms, well in excess of the recommended 100ms limits for gaming, VoIP, video streaming and other interactive applications. It found also that download speeds from international servers averaged only 14.5 percent of advertised speeds, with some ADSL services performing as well as some ADSL2+ services.

The Epitiro report said: "None of Australia's ISPs showed average ping times that would be considered acceptable by competitive Internet game players. On closer investigation Epitiro found that ping times to national servers were quite good."

Downloading Web pages from locations external to Australia was much slower than downloading external pages in most other countries that Epitiro monitors. TCP download speeds from an Epitiro server in the UK revealed a significant drop in percentage achieved with an average of 25.9 percent ADSL2+ services achieved only 6.8 percent of the advertised package speed. "Results indicate that Australian broadband may struggle with overseas connectivity," Epitiro concluded.

Mike Cranna, managing director of Epitiro for Australia & New Zealand, told iTWire the poor international performance of Australian ISPs compared to their overseas counterparts was in part simply a function of distance but also due to the relatively high usage of overseas web sites. "Because Australia is an English speaking country the percentage of content accessed overseas is much greater than in, say Korea or Japan."

Telstra the best ISP, followed by TPG
For comparison purposes, Epitiro applies a proprietary algorithm to the measured parameters for each service and on this basis has rated Telstra the best performing ISP in Australia, followed by TPG and iiNet Netspace, AAPT, Internode, Westnet and Optus. In its previous survey the top eight were Telstra, iiNet, TPG, Netspace, Optus, Westnet, AAPT and Internode.

Several of these resell the underlying services of other providers, mostly Telstra and Optus, although AAPT resells iiNet services. Cranna said no attempt had been made to compare these underlying services. "In a report of this nature we did not want to get into that level of detail, but it is something we will look at in future reports."
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