Australia
Opensignal is the independent global standard for analyzing consumers' connectivity experiences. Our industry reports are the definitive guide to understanding what happens when people use their mobile and broadband connections in their daily life.
Australia
Opensignal is the independent global standard for analyzing consumers' connectivity experiences. Our industry reports are the definitive guide to understanding what happens when people use their mobile and broadband connections in their daily life.
Key Findings
National
Telstra triumphs for Consistent Quality
Our Telstra users see the most consistent services in Australia, as the ISP wins the award with a score of 85.6%. These scores represent the percentage of users’ tests that have met the minimum recommended performance thresholds to watch HD video, complete group video conference calls and play games. Consistent Quality is focused on individual users’ broadband experience and needs.
Aussie Broadband and Optus jointly win Reliability Experience
Aussie Broadband and Optus share the winners’ podium for Reliability Experience. Opensignal’s Broadband Reliability Experience metric uses higher thresholds for performance than CQ to reflect demand from multiple simultaneous users in a household.
Our Optus users enjoy the most consistent services in Australia in the FWA category
In the FWA category, Optus wins Consistent Quality outright, with a score of 77.5%, and Video Experience. Meanwhile, Telstra comes first for Download Speed Experience, while both ISPs are in a statistical tie for Upload Speed.
Aussie Broadband wins the most outright awards across the cities
Aussie Broadband takes five city awards outright out of 25 available across five Australian cities. It wins three awards outright in Pert and two in Melbourne. Telstra wins one city award for Consistent Quality in Brisbane while Vodafone leads the pack for Download Speed in Adelaide.
Market Overview
In this report Opensignal has examined real-world data from our Australian fixed broadband users. To reflect the varying ways in which fixed broadband is used we include six different measures of user experience: Consistent Quality, Download Speed, Peak Download Speed, Upload Speed, Video Experience, and Reliability Experience. Together, these measures capture the wide range of ways that households use broadband services, ranging from remote work and education to video streaming and gaming.
We include Australia’s six main internet service providers – Aussie Broadband, Optus, Telstra, TPG, Vocus, and Vodafone which together hold more than 90% of the Australian residential NBN wholesale market. The analysis period covers their performance over 90 days starting May 1, 2024, to see how these Australian ISPs fared.
We also feature ISPs’ scores in five of Australia’s main cities — Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney. Separately, we compared our users’ experience on two FWA networks as well — Optus and Telstra.
Plan characteristics — for example, speed tiers or data caps — vary greatly by provider and the dispersion of the plan mix will affect the average experience result. Opensignal’s measurements capture users’ experience, regardless of the plan they purchased from their provider. This report analyzes the real-world situation across all users’ plans.
National Fixed Broadband Experience
Category description:
The experience of our users across all of the broadband access delivery technologies used by the providers.
Aussie Broadband dominates the awards table for fixed broadband experience in Australia, with three outright wins — all in speed categories — and two joint wins. Our Telstra users see the most consistent services in Australia, as the ISP wins the award with a score of 85.6%.
Optus shares the winners’ podium for two awards — Video Experience and Reliability Experience, while Vocus is a joint winner for Video Experience.
Definitions
Broadband Consistent Quality measures how often a network, from the perspective of a single device once connectivity is established, meets the requirements for common applications. Broadband Consistent Quality uses six key performance indicators: download and upload speeds, latency, jitter, packet loss, and time to first byte, setting thresholds appropriate for individual rather than multiple device usage. Metrics represent the percentage of users’ tests meeting these performance thresholds to support activities like watching HD video, completing group video calls, and gaming across all hours of the day.
Definitions
Measured in Mbps, Broadband Download Speed represents the typical everyday speeds a user experiences across a provider’s network.
Definitions
Measured in Mbps, Broadband Peak Download Speed represents the 98th percentile of the user speed distribution. i.e. this is what the users with the highest speeds within the footprint experience.
Definitions
Measured in Mbps, Broadband Upload Speed measures the average upload speeds for each internet service provider observed by our users across their fixed networks. Typically, upload speeds are slower than download speeds, but this often depends on the technology used for broadband connections.
Definitions
Opensignal’s adaptive video experience quantifies the quality of video streamed to mobile devices by measuring real-world video streams over an operator's network. The metric measures users’ adaptive video experience using a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) approach inspired by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) studies which have derived a relationship between technical parameters of adaptive bitrate video streaming and the perceived video experience as reported by real people.
The videos tested are streamed directly from the world’s largest video content providers and include a wide selection of resolutions that dynamically match the network conditions, available bandwidth and device performance. Resolutions range from 144p to 2160p, which is also called 4K or UHD (Ultra High Definition). The model calculates a MOS score on a 0 to 100 scale by evaluating a number of parameters, including: the time to start playing the video, the quality of the video, the time playing each resolution, and the time spent re-buffering.
Definitions
Opensignal's Broadband Reliability Experience measures the ability of a household to connect to the internet and to successfully complete 'uninterrupted' tasks across multiple devices, encompassing work and recreational activities. While Reliability incorporates and expands upon elements akin to Broadband Consistent Quality, it uniquely includes assessments of initial connectivity and continuous completion of tasks, making it more comprehensive in scenarios involving multiple simultaneous connections.
Category description:
The experience of our users who are served by Fixed Wireless Access (FWA).
Looking at FWA providers, Optus triumphs for Consistent Quality, with a score of 77.5%, and for Video Experience. Meanwhile, Telstra comes first for Download Speed Experience, while both ISPs are in a statistical tie for Upload Speed. As our previous analysis demonstrates, our users in Australia have, on average, a far superior broadband experience when using Fiber compared to (FWA), with the experience gap even wider in rural areas.
Definitions
Broadband Consistent Quality measures how often a network, from the perspective of a single device once connectivity is established, meets the requirements for common applications. Broadband Consistent Quality uses six key performance indicators: download and upload speeds, latency, jitter, packet loss, and time to first byte, setting thresholds appropriate for individual rather than multiple device usage. Metrics represent the percentage of users’ tests meeting these performance thresholds to support activities like watching HD video, completing group video calls, and gaming across all hours of the day.
Definitions
Measured in Mbps, Broadband Download Speed represents the typical everyday speeds a user experiences across a provider’s network.
Definitions
Measured in Mbps, Broadband Upload Speed measures the average upload speeds for each internet service provider observed by our users across their fixed networks. Typically, upload speeds are slower than download speeds, but this often depends on the technology used for broadband connections.
Definitions
Opensignal’s adaptive video experience quantifies the quality of video streamed to mobile devices by measuring real-world video streams over an operator's network. The metric measures users’ adaptive video experience using a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) approach inspired by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) studies which have derived a relationship between technical parameters of adaptive bitrate video streaming and the perceived video experience as reported by real people.
The videos tested are streamed directly from the world’s largest video content providers and include a wide selection of resolutions that dynamically match the network conditions, available bandwidth and device performance. Resolutions range from 144p to 2160p, which is also called 4K or UHD (Ultra High Definition). The model calculates a MOS score on a 0 to 100 scale by evaluating a number of parameters, including: the time to start playing the video, the quality of the video, the time playing each resolution, and the time spent re-buffering.
City Fixed Broadband Experience
Category description:
The experience of our users across all of the broadband access delivery technologies used by the providers.
We analyzed the experience of our Australian users across five of Australia’s main cities — Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.
Aussie Broadband takes five city awards outright and 18 jointly out of 25 available across the analyzed cities. It wins three awards outright in Perth, for Download Speed, Upload Speed, and Reliability Experience. Aussie Broadband also triumphs for Download Speed and Upload Speed in Melbourne.
Telstra wins one city award outright for Consistent Quality in Brisbane and a further 13 city awards jointly. Vodafone leads the pack for Download Speed in Adelaide and shares the winners’ podium for six more awards. Optus shares the winners’ podium 12 times, while TPG and Vocus — six times each.
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Category description:
The experience of our users who are served by Fixed Wireless Access (FWA).
Related Analysis
Our Methodology
Collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally, Opensignal independently analyzes mobile and broadband user experience on every major network operator around the globe.
About Opensignal
Opensignal is the leading global provider of independent insights into consumers' connectivity experiences and choice of carrier. Our proprietary insights into mobile and broadband networks give operators the solutions they need to profitably compete and win, from executive level scorecards and public validation to pin-point level engineering analytics and consumer decision dynamics.
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Confidence Intervals
For every metric we calculate statistical confidence intervals indicated on our graphs. When confidence intervals overlap, our measured results are too close to declare a winner. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.
In our bar graphs we represent confidence intervals as boundaries on either sides of graph bars.
In our supporting-metric charts we show confidence intervals as +/- numerical values.
Why confidence intervals are vital in analyzing mobile network experience