NZ Fibre Performance Outstrips the Competition

NZ Fibre Performance Outstrips the Competition

The government sponsored fibre installation project (UFB or Ultra Fast Broadband) is very much faster at downloading webpages than other technologies in New Zealand.

Fibre Performs Best

TrueNet compared identical test webpages from New Zealand, Australia and the United States with the homepage of Trademe, to provide a ranking of technologies for downloading webpages during the evening busy hour (9-10pm).

Performance of webpage downloads show that Fibre customers not only receive fast file downloads as reported in our April report, but they also have very quick website downloads.  Unexpectedly, Cable and ADSL customers are receiving very slow webpage downloads in NZ.

TrueNet compared three sites with the same standard testpage on each site; a 300kB page made up of pictures and text, very like a relatively small page found on many sites.  A copy of this page can be found on our website here.  To provide a comparison, we put these alongside the results of Trademe's live, ~500kB, homepage.

The four sites tested include:

1. NZ - TrueNet's testpage located in Auckland and Wellington
2. Australia - Testpage on a Sydney server
3. USA - Testpage on a Dallas, Texas server
4. Trademe - Trademe homepage located on Trademe servers in Auckland & Wellington

The Trademe homepage is quite different to TrueNet's standard testpage, it is live and changes very frequently.  It is larger with many photos, and some smart technologies Trademe uses to speed up the download.  

The chart is sorted by the time taken to download the New Zealand standard webpage.

Click for big version.

The standard NZ webpage takes 5 times as long to download on ADSL as it does on Fibre, and the same webpage in Australia takes twice as long on ADSL as it does on Fibre.

VDSL performance in NZ is almost comparable with Fibre, only international performance is a bit slower.

An unexpected result for urban technologies is the performance of Cable when downloading the standard page. From Australia it has the poorest performance, but from the USA it ranks the best.   

Glossary

Details on how we measure are available on our Technical page. 

ADSL, VDSL, DSL - the standard broadband service provided over a telephone line,  VDSL is a faster version than ADSL.  They use similar technology and backhaul, so sometimes DSL is used when referring to both.  Both DSL products are sold as FS/FS, or Full Speed/Full Speed, ie as fast as your line will allow.

UFB - Ultra Fast Broadband, the government project to provide fibre to NZ homes

RPB - Rural Broadband Initiative, the government project to provide faster broadband to the rural sector.

Capped Plans - the most common ADSL service, where you have a monthly plan having a GigaByte (GB) limit of usage each month before your speed is slowed or you must pay more.

Rampup - When a file starts to download on the internet, the speed of the download is very similar to a car, there is an acceleration time we call Rampup, referring to the time taken for the file transfer to achieve full speed.

Unlimited Plans - ADSL service where there is no monthly limit on the amount of data used.  Specifications for this service include that it may be "Managed" and have "performance reductions applied during peak demand periods."

Cable - Vodafone are the only ISP that offers Cable, which is available in a limited number of suburbs of Wellington, Christchurch and Kapiti (Usually suburbs with overhead wires)

DSLAM - the exchange or cabinet based equipment that your modem is connected to, over the pair of copper wires that are exclusively allocated to your premises.

Ethernet - The wiring used to connect computers to a network, typically an Ethernet cable is coloured (often blue), with small square connectors at each end.

ISPs - TrueNet has probes measuring almost 20 ISPs but only reports on those where there are 5 or more probes working during any particular month.

Latency - The time for a packet of data to be returned by a remote server to the probe when a "Ping" command is issued.  TrueNet sets targets for maximum median latency that are known to be achivable. 

Median - Median results are used for all measurements.  This means that any result represents the “middle” performance measure applicable.  Using median ensures that the result is more representative due to the often skewed nature of measurements.

Speed - Throughput or the median peak connection speed achieved during our standard test downloading an image from our test servers.  TrueNet normally reports speed as a comparison at low vs high demand times to show any capacity constraints evident in speed performance, often called the Time of Day analysis.

UFB Fibre -  Ultra Fast Broadband connections are the service offered by some ISPs over the Fibre to the Home (FTTH) network being subsidised by the government.  Services now being offered include 100Mbps and 30Mbps. 

Webpage Download - TrueNet maintains a Standard Test page which is used for measuring the time to download the entire page.  This page is visible here, we use a copy located on our test servers for test downloads.

ENDS

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