Is there anything more infuriating than slow internet? I’ve honestly never wanted to fight a computer more than when I was dealing with my tax return, only for the whole page to crash right before I hit submit. Maybe my problem was trying to do my own tax in the first place (the final frontier of being a functional adult), but the garbage internet connection certainly didn’t help.
When the NBN was first pitched to us over a decade ago, it was going to be this amazing project that wold catapult Australia to the front of the digital game. The things we were promised were amazing, but sadly for us and our blood pressure, those promises wound up getting the Spinning Wheel Of Death and crashing. Hard.
Nobody is stoked with this outcome, and the Government seems particularly unhappy. Not unhappy that the internet sucks by the way, but unhappy that we keep getting called out on it. They could always try the solution of fixing the damn internet, but it seems that they’d rather give gaslighting the entire country a go.
This week at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, NBN Co will launch its very own internet speed ranking system based on research that they paid for. It’s called the Global Broadband Speed Report, and at the same time as proving how great we are, it’s suspiciously going to ‘debunk’ every other ranking system that has said Australia has terrible internet.
One of those systems is the Ookla Speed Test. Ookla is an American company that has been comparing internet performances since 2006, and nobody seems to have a problem with them except for our Government.
Back in April this year, an Ookla report ranked Australia’s internet only 62nd in the world, behind developing nations like Kosovo, Kazakhstan, and Barbados. If we want to look at numbers, Singapore topped the charts with 199.62 mbps average speed, and the global average speed is 57.91 mbps. Australia crawls in with just 35.11 mbps.
No word on what the Government’s shiny new ranking system will say that Australia should really be coming in at, but my guess is that it will be much (much) higher than 62nd. Problem solved, right?
This isn’t the first time they’ve been sprung paying for research to fix a problem. Back in March this year, the NBN Co paid for a report that said the NBN is super accessible and that Australia’s broadband affordability is among the best in the world. That would great except for the fact that this goes directly against the Government’s own findings from 2017 that say the NBN is really hard to afford if you’re in a low income household. I’m guessing that somebody in the Government assumed they’d get away with the different reports as long as nobody was actually able to Google it.
It’s a unique Australian experience to give up on the WiFi and jut use your data in your own house, and the NBN doesn’t look like it’s going to be solving that particular problem any time soon. Strap yourselves in my friends, we’re going to be yelling at our computers for a long time yet.