The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s second Critical Services Report - released on Thursday, reveals that in the first two weeks of October, Netflix’s daily download speed improved to be between 6% to 7% higher than its February 2020 baseline. Over the same period, YouTube’s daily download speed was between 1% to 4% higher than its February 2020 baseline.

Results also show that streaming services, Netflix and YouTube had typically faster download speeds than in the first Critical Services Report, which showed performance during May 2020.

The Critical Services Report tracks the performance of the NBN fixed-line broadband connections that support streaming and video conferencing services.

“These improvements are welcomed given the sustained increase in the use of video streaming services due to the pandemic,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said. 

“The free network capacity boost offered by NBN Co at the outset of the pandemic has been key to the continual uplift in access quality to online applications,” Mr Sims said.

Sims notes that NBN Co and service providers introduced mitigation measures to alleviate congestion on broadband networks due to COVID-19, including reductions in the bitrates or the picture quality of their services - wth most video streaming services returning to full bitrates by October 2020 with the relaxation of pandemic restrictions.

“The MBA program data has allowed us to see how the mitigations and network boosts have improved streaming quality, and benefitted consumers, since the last report,” Sims said.

The report shows broadly consistent results to the first Critical Services Report, which monitored performance during May 2020. In October 2020, NBN consumers continued to have very good access to video conferencing applications, with low round trip latency on all domestic hosted conferences for those on a NBN25, NBN50 or NBN100 and regardless of NBN technology or choice of conference host.

Higher latency was seen for consumers in Western Australia accessing conferences that are hosted on servers on the East Coast, and for all consumers where international server locations were used to host a conference.

The report also shows that video conferencing applications hosted in Australia connected with a low latency of around 25 milliseconds or less in October 2020, while internationally hosted video conferencing applications had latency of over 100 milliseconds.

The ACCC says this indicates that users of the applications with domestically hosted servers would have had less lag or delay compared with video conferencing applications hosted overseas.

“It is more likely that a video conference will be hosted overseas if consumers are using a free account, however there are some situations where even a paid video conference application could be hosted overseas,” the ACCC says.