ACCC Measuring Broadband Reports
For the international readers, the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is a Consumer Protection focused regulatory body at the level of Federal Government in Australia. In 2018, they began publishing reports related to comparing performance between various Retail Service Providers (or ISPs) on the nbn (National Broadband Network) and other fixed-line customer access networks in Australia. The ACCC has contracted SamKnows (owned by Cisco) to orchestrate the testing and collection of data that is used to produce these reports, SamKnows performs these tests by selectively distributing a testing device to Australian internet users on an opt-in basis and having them plug the device into their local network at home.
Within Australia these reports have a questionable reputation at best amongst the Network Engineering community, we'll explore why this is so in this post.