Australian web pages download faster in New Zealand than in Sydney

New Zealand broadband network is accelerating past Australia’s.

Local web performance measuring specialist TrueNet compared the speed of downloading Australian and New Zealand websites from PCs in Australia and New Zealand.

The results are conclusive. They show New Zealanders can download Australian web pages faster than people on the other side of the Tasman Sea.

TrueNet says: “Results from any NZ probe are likely to be much better than from one in Australia.”

TrueNet puts New Zealand’s better performance down to the nationwide network of fibre-fed roadside cabinets. New Zealand completed its cabinet network in 2011. Australia has only recently begun testing its own cabinet network.

Now New Zealand is moving to the next broadband generation with a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network that promises to further increase the speed performance.

By 2019 around 75 percent of New Zealand's population will have fibre, soon after that will extend to around 85 percent.  Almost everyone else will have improved broadband.

A story I wrote for PC Magazine last month found New Zealand has an average download speed of 21 Mbps compared with 16 Mbps in Australia. That’s a huge difference, enough to make a noticeable difference in practice.