G'day y'all
I live in country WA and will soon need to sign up to an NBN contract. I was wondering, given the national rollout means service providers use a standardised system, what is the actual difference in service provided by providers?
I'm looking at getting an unlimited plan, 40mbp/s and the top three contender are decided. Is there any difference in what one service can provide for $60 compared to another for $80?
Some providers basically cap out their bandwidth and don't provision for any more. So in peakhours, you may not get anywhere near your speed limit. Others are a lot better. Some are transparent about that such as Aussie Broadband
NBN solely own and operate the part of the network from the POI (Point of Inter Connect) to your home. In metro areas, your POI is likely the nearest Telephone Exchange.. in your case, probably your biggest regional centre's Exchange, even if your town has a mini-exchange, NBN bypasses these) There are 121 POI's across the nation.
You ISP is responsible for providing the network from that point to the rest of the World.
To get data out of a POI, NBN charge a speed toll to your ISP called CVC. This is different from the speed package that you buy, ie NBN50.
CVC is shared by all customers of an ISP connected to that POI.
Your ISP pays $15/month for every mega bit per second (1024 bits per second) of speed limit they can draw from the POI into their network. ie in order to service an NBN50 customer, with their full 50mbps, ISP's need to pay NBN 50x$15 = $750 per month.
Obviously when you're paying $70/month to your ISP that's not viable.. so the ISP shares the CVC around all their customers. Usually only buying an average of somewhere between 1 and 2mbps/customer.
Cheap ISP's have a lower budget to buy CVC than Expensive ISP's, as a result the share of CVC is likely closer to the 1mbps/ customer with a cheap ISP.
Once data exist's NBN's network, it has to get largely overseas. ISP's also pay for capacity on International data links, in a similar manner to CVC (only significantly cheaper).. Once again, cheap ISP's have less budget to spend on International Links and therefore cheap ISP customers are more likely to see slowdowns when the bought capacity is overloaded.
On top of that, there is customer service and other frills, like webhosting space, or Optus's Optus Sport offering.
Any extra you're paying for, either in extra fees, or in decreased service elsewhere.
There are lots of technical reasons why it's not even close to a standardised service. However, the thing you really have to bear in mind is that all the services are in a 'landgrab' scenario, trying to get all the new customers they can. They will charge the minimum they can to cover their costs (and often they fail at even that eg Telecube) and if you see a difference in price, there will be a difference in service.
The only ones who don't follow that rule are the big providers who think they have a 'brand' and that they own the customers. They will charge more than they are worth, because they think people will go with them anyway (you are already thinking of two of them).
Mainly just level of customer support and trading hours and available points of contact (email, live chat, phone number etc) which you can't really get unless you ask other customers and members either here or on whirlpool forums.
Pick the one that looks like it will be here in 5-10 years.
Don't pick ones that look really small and too good to be true.
My advice is go with the biggest one but I don't even follow my own advice and support smaller businesses so eat your heart out.