Australian web downloads faster in Auckland than Sydney

Nothing illustrates the gulf opening between broadband services in New Zealand and Australia better than this snippet of data from TrueNet’s October 2016 report.

The major point we noticed this month is the gap opening up between NZ ISPs and our sample Australian ISP TPG. This is despite the impact of the distance across the Tasman.

Typically trans-Tasman ping times are around 23 milliseconds. That is the time it takes data to travel from Sydney to Auckland. TPG is Australia’s second largest service provider.

TPG is a lot worse than all NZ ISPs for downloading New Zealand websites. We may expect that due to downloading across the Tasman, But TPG is worse at downloading Australian and USA websites than any NZ ISPs we measure.

Australian web performance

In other words New Zealand broadband performance is now so much better than Australia’s performance that we can get at their data faster than they can despite their 23 ms head start.

TrueNet goes on to report another aspect comparing trans-Tasman broadband performance:

… our ADSL and VDSL average speeds improved to 11Mbps for ADSL, while VDSL improved to 35Mbps average. With the increasing number and speed of fibre and VDSL connections the New Zealand average speed is approaching or exceeding the Australian target of 25Mbps.