MEDIA RELEASE
10 August 2016
Netflix’s latest ISP Speed Index shows why Labor can’t be trusted to roll out the National Broadband Network to all Australians.
Labor’s 2016 election policy was to slow down the nbn rollout completion by at least two years leaving Australians waiting for better broadband until at least 2022.
Thanks to the Coalition’s faster, more affordable rollout the nbn is on track to be connected to all Australian homes and businesses by 2020.
Labor does no favours for informed policy debate with its failure to grasp basic concepts, such as the difference between wholesale and retail services.
As Netflix acknowledges in its report, the speed index “is a measure of prime time Netflix performance on particular ISPs (internet service providers) around the globe, and not a measure of overall performance for other services/data that may travel across the specific ISP network.”
nbn is a wholesale-only operator selling access to retail service providers, which then provision their network capacity to provide services to customers.
Labor’s ignorance of technical detail is further highlighted by its new Communications spokesperson, Michelle Rowland, using two different speed rankings in the one statement both of which show markedly different results.
The Akamai ‘State of the Internet’ report ranks Singapore as the number one country in the world for broadband speeds yet Singapore’s Netflix Speed Index ranking (3.75 Mbps) is virtually identical to Australia’s (3.36 Mbps).
Other countries ranked on the Netflix ISP Speed Index also show similar results to Australia:
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Singapore: 3.75 Mbps
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Hong Kong: 3.64 Mbps
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USA: 3.61 Mbps
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UK: 3.72 Mbps
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Canada: 3.42 Mbps
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New Zealand: 3.54 Mbps
Under the Coalition, the nbn rollout is powering ahead with close to three million homes and businesses now able to order a service. Close to 1.2 million users are now connected to the nbn.
In contrast, Labor managed to connect a total of 51,000 users nationwide during its six years of government.