The retail service provider publishes CVC details in an effort to end the bandwidth blame game.
One issue with the NBN is that it can be hard to see where any bottlenecks are actually occurring. Low speeds during peak times are often attributed to the retail service provider purchasing insufficient CVC (connectivity virtual circuits) – essentially the amount of bandwidth available between the NBN and the provider’s own network.
NBN RSP Aussie Broadband revealed last year that it would make public the amount of CVC it has at each NBN point of interconnect (PoI), and to show how much of it is used throughout the day.
Starting today, these figures are available in graphical form on the company's web site.
For example, on 18 March 2018 Aussie Broadband had 250Mbps of CVC available at the Lakemba PoI, with peak usage of around 200Mbps occurring at approximately 6.30pm.
In Port Melbourne, 500Mbps was available, with several peaks around 400Mbps between 7pm and 11pm.
An important part of Aussie Broadband's pitch to customers is that it makes sure that sufficient bandwidth is available by buying additional CVC as needed.
So it makes sense to make the CVC numbers available to customers and potential customers so they can see what's happening. The benefit from Aussie Broadband's perspective is that it is less likely to be incorrectly blamed for having insufficient CVC.
As managing director Phillip Britt put it: “It’s really part of our “no bullsh*t approach to things.
“We’ve been providing CVC graphs for a while to answer individual queries about levels of traffic management; this just makes the whole process public, visible and ongoing.
“Anyone with concerns about congestion in their area can immediately take a look at the traffic on their Point of Interconnect for the past 24 hours and see whether there were any issues with the Aussie network.
“If they’re experiencing congestion and they can see there is none on their CVC graph, it can help narrow things down to perhaps a local Wi-Fi interference issue, or an NBN network issue."
Aussie Broadband's network centre provides convenient access to additional information including current ping times between selected locations. For example, at the time of writing Melbourne-Sydney was 9.8ms and Adelaide-Singapore was 87ms.
The network centre also provides scheduled PoI upgrades – for example, another 10Gbps has been ordered for the Castle Hill PoI and is expected by 25 May.
The company says it has an average CVC of 1.95Mbps per user, where the industry average is 1.52Mbps.
