I’ve been tracking the NBN speeds we’ve been getting in the last four houses we’ve lived in. (NBN is Australia’s National Broadband Network, by the way.)
Since 2015, when we swapped our ADSL connection for the NBN, every time we’ve moved house our speeds have been gotten better. That’s mainly because, when picking a place to rent, we’ve only looked at houses with Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) connections. (Also because the NBN network itself has been getting incrementally better.)
This time, because we wanted a specific type of house within our price range, we decided to compromise a little and go for a place with a Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) connection. The performance of FTTC connections depends very much on how far your house is from the fibre-optic distribution point on your street. We lucked out and found a house we wanted to rent that is directly across the street from one of these points.
Speeds I can live with
Compared to the house we just moved from, our download have dropped only 12.7% to 91.9Mbps, which I’m super happy about.
Unfortunately our upload speeds dropped by 51.2% to 18.5Mbps, which isn’t ideal.
Given how much time Nadia and I spend on video conference calls for work, this drop in upload speeds might be an issue if we’re both on a video call at the same time. I guess we’ll wait and see how the connection performs when that situation arises in the next few weeks.
Other changes: latency, technology
There are two other differences compared to our previous NBN connection.
First, our connection latency has increased 78% from 3ms to 5ms. You don’t notice that too much day-to-day, though, so this hasn’t been an issue so far.
Second, given the technology change from FTTP to FTTC, we had to change modems because the fantastic Synology RT2600ac we were using doesn’t support VLANs (virtual local area networks).
UPDATE (24 Aug 2022): With a firmware upgrade to SRM 1.3, the Synology RT2600ac router does now support VLANs (announcement; feature support; configuration info). A big thank-you to to Craig in the comments for letting me know about this update!
FTTC is more of a shared connection than FTTP, so you need to use a VLAN-capable modem to connect to the internet. But all is well because I quickly bought a Netgear Nighthawk AX8, which is an equally fantastic modem that does support VLANs (and, specifically, 802.1Q VLAN tagging).
(If any of you are wanting to connect your Netgear Nighthawk AX8 to an FTTC connection, by the way, follow the configuration that rhys375 figured out you need to get this working.)
A mixed bag, but I’m okay with it
Overall I’m comfortable with our new speeds. I might think differently if we have issues with simultaneous video conferencing, but I don’t expect this to be a major issue.
So, onwards and only slightly downwards! And let’s hope the NBN network keeps getting better and better as time goes by.