Your nbn® can run slowly for a number of reasons. When initially moving to an nbn® connection, users often experience dramatically increased bandwidth compared to older ADSL services.
It is important to understand how your devices use the internet to ensure a good experience with the additional bandwidth. Things like the hardware and software that you use may affect the speed that you experience.
The technology used by NBN Co to deliver the service to your home or business may also affect your speeds.
It’s important to understand how many devices are using your nbn® service.
It is always important to know how many users are on your network. Remember this can be via cabled ethernet connections to your modem, as well as via wifi. The more devices you have connected, the more your bandwidth is shared.
If you are on a basic speed plan and have a high number of users you may wish to consider upgrading your nbn® speed. More customers can do this easily in the customer portal, and there are no speed change fees – which means you can change up and down speeds as much as you like.
It’s also important to ensure you have a secured Wifi network and password. Without this, anyone nearby can log on to your Wifi and start consuming your bandwidth. If you offer Wifi to your customers and have distributed your password – it may be worth changing your Wifi password every month or so. This will ensure that only current customers are able to use your Wifi.
Check your software.
The software that runs on your computers will often impact the performance of your nbn®. Software can include the programs you have knowingly installed, but also foreign software that you did not knowingly install. This may include viruses, spyware and other malware.
To ensure your computer is not infected with a virus it’s important to keep your computers running up to date virus protection. A virus can hijack your internet connection, consume your bandwidth unknowingly and your nbn® service may appear to be running slow. Other problem software that may be running in the background includes torrent software. This is used to download and distribute large files like movies.
For business customers, employees may bring their own devices into the office where they have torrent software running in the background. These would quickly consume your bandwidth and slow your nbn® service down significantly.
Please note that it is illegal to download and distribute copyrighted material and More does not permit this type of usage on its network.
System Updates.
Windows will often run updates to their software.
You can control when your computers run updates, and it’s recommended to time these overnight. It’s also possible to limit the maximum bandwidth that each device on your network can achieve. This is very useful in businesses and it ensures that a single device cannot consume all the bandwidth for the business.
Check apps like OneDrive and Dropbox.
Business apps like OneDrive and Dropbox will use your nbn® service to sync and backup files to their remote storage systems. With increased bandwidth available on the nbn® these apps can consume bandwidth faster than with ADSL. If these apps consume all your bandwidth it can lead to slow performance on other devices and poor VOIP phone call quality.
If you use these apps it is easy to limit the amount of bandwidth that the app can use. Simply check the settings and limit the amount of bandwidth for uploading and downloading by the app. Note that these apps can run in the background and users may not know that a sync is taking place.
Network Coexistence on Fibre to the Node nbn®.
If your business receives nbn® using Fibre to the Node (FTTN) technology, the term ‘Network Coexistence’ is used to describe the time when nbn® and ADSL is running at the same time in an area. During this time nbn® have advised that maximum speeds will not be achieved on the nbn® network. The period of coexistence should only apply for the 18 months that internet users in the area have to migrate from ADSL to nbn®. After this time users should see improvements to speed. Unfortunately, there is little we can do when an area is declared to be in network coexistence other than patiently wait for the transition to nbn® to complete. Please note that this is only applicable to FTTN nbn® services. Our team can advise if your area is declared as network coexistence.
Fixed Wireless Congestion.
In areas of the country where fixed wireless technology is used to deliver nbn® there is chance that you may experience wireless tower congestion. This is where an nbn® wireless tower is oversubscribed and has too many users connecting to it. NBN Co have worked to upgrade towers to cope with the high demand. In the majority of cases the network slowdown with wireless congestion is experienced in the evenings when residential users stream TV services like Netflix. As such our business customers rarely report issues with wireless network congestion.
Network Faults & Planned Maintenance
At times users may experience a network fault with the nbn® network. If you have checked all the points above and still find that your nbn® service is running slower than expected please get in touch with our team. Please have the make, model and MAC address of your nbn® modem/router ready so we can quickly log the issues with our network carrier for investigation.
You can check your internet speed at speedtest.net at any time.
