Broadband performance improves as Telecom boosts caching capacity

Wednesday 23rd September 2009

The quality of New Zealand’s broadband improved in the three months ended June 30 as Telecom Corp., the country’s largest listed phone company, boosted its capacity to store popular international content locally.

The Commerce Commission’s latest quarterly report on broadband quality found overall performance has steadily improved since the beginning of last year as telecommunications companies increase investment in broadband infrastructure.

The Eptiro report singled out Telecom’s efforts to boost its international caching capabilities, which saw the company’s high-speed internet quality improve “significantly.”

“Increased investment seems to have been a primary driver of these quality improvements,” said Telecommunications Commissioner Ross Patterson, in a statement. “Further investment will be necessary to continue this trend, particularly through the use of caching and similar proven performance enhancing measures.”

Broadband is key policy plank for the government, which has pledged $1.5 billion over the next 10 years for the network roll-out to provide high-speed internet to three-quarters of the population.

Last week, Communications Minister Steven Joyce outlined how the government will partner with industry to achieve its goal. Barring Telecom’s full implementation of its caching performance, the report found there was a “lack of major new investments” in the sector.

A failing highlighted in the report was the poor internet speeds in cities farthest away from Auckland. The best performing internet service providers recorded speeds of up to six megabits per second (Mbps) in the country’s largest city, while the slowest were in Dunedin at just over three Mbps.

“The difference in performance is likely to be attributable to the need to route traffic from the user location through to Auckland,” the report said. “Some ISPs are reputedly putting in place new backhaul arrangements for South Island cities, which may bring South Island speeds closer to those recorded in the North Island.”

Backhaul arrangements are the links that let phone companies’ competitors provide landline and broadband services.

Turning off the data management setting known as interleaving was again cited as a cause of faster speeds at the cost of reduced stability.

Vodafone boosted its performed significantly in Auckland and Hamilton, but was flat in the other centres, while Slingshot, the subsidiary of CallPlus Services., and Orcon Internet showed incremental gains.

TelstraClear’s cable and digital subscriber line, the technology that allows broadband to be delivered over a copper line, were again excluded from the survey after it was found the plan being measured wasn’t the company’s premium offering.

The smaller ISPs reported mixed results in the report, with several showing “significant” variability in web browsing performance.

Shares in Telecom were unchanged at $2.61, and have climbed 15% this year.

Businesswire.co.nz

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