As the resident NBN and home-internet expert for TechRadar Australia, I spend much of my time looking out for the best internet deals, and there are almost invariably a number of compelling options at every different speed tier — and these can be a great way to sense-check if you’re overpaying for your current NBN service.
When choosing deals, much of my decision-making revolves around two easily identifiable metrics: price and typical evening speed (TES). Typical evening speed is something all internet service providers (ISPs) have to disclose before you sign up for a plan. In essence, it tells you the download speed you can realistically expect to achieve during the busier evening hours of 7pm to 11pm. Being able to view the TES also means you can easily identify which ISPs ultimately offer better value — i.e. the ones advertising fast evening speeds at competitively low prices.
With almost all of the best NBN 500 plans promising to deliver their maximum 500Mbps speeds even during the peak evening period, it’s a tier where direct price comparisons make sense. However, things get a bit wobblier when you’re shopping for faster speeds, such as NBN 750 and NBN 1000.
Most plans on these tiers make more conservative promises when it comes to typical evening speed — for example, rather than the 1,000Mbps you might expect from NBN 1000, on these gigabit plans, most providers only promise evening speeds in the 820-860Mbps range. With that TES figure closer to 750Mbps than 1,000Mbps, it prompted me to ask a simple question: Is NBN 1000 actually worth it, or should you save yourself some moolah every month and opt for NBN 750 instead?
Cue a whole load of number crunching!
So average
First, I calculated the current average monthly cost of NBN 750 and NBN 1000 plans, alongside the average TES advertised by the providers I monitor. After crunching the numbers on NBN 750 plans from 14 providers and NBN 1000 plans from 20, the final results were:
|
Measure |
NBN 750 |
NBN 1000 |
|---|---|---|
|
Average price |
AU$105.98 |
AU$114.95 |
|
Average TES |
730.2 Mbps |
835.4 Mbps |
As expected, the results show that NBN 1000 plans do not, on average, get as close to their nominal 1,000 Mbps tier speed as NBN 750 plans get to 750 Mbps. The gigabit gap was quite substantial, falling 164.6Mbps shy of the tier’s nominal 1,000 Mbps tier, compared to a shortfall of just 19.8 Mbps for NBN 750.
With the average monthly cost less than AU$10 difference between the two tiers — specifically AU$8.97, or 8.5% — the question then became whether the NBN 1000’s typical evening speeds are worth it from a value perspective. For that, we of course needed to do some more maths:
|
Measure |
NBN 750 |
NBN 1000 |
|---|---|---|
|
Shortfall from theoretical maximum |
19.8 Mbps |
164.6 Mbps |
|
TES as share of maximum |
97.36% |
83.54% |
|
Cost per advertised TES Mbps |
14.5 cents |
13.8 cents |
Next steps
With NBN 1000 plans falling far short of 1,000Mbps in their typical evening speed promises (averaging just 83.5%), intuitively they seemed like they’d come out second fiddle to NBN 750. Surprisingly, however, NBN 1000 is slightly ahead when comparing cost per megabit for typical evening speeds: 13.8 cents for NBN 1000 versus 14.5 cents for NBN 750. There are a couple of NBN 750 plans that come in below that average at 13 cents per megabit — Kogan Internet and Spintel — which I’ve listed below.
In other words, NBN 1000 might cost more in absolute terms, but it does offer slightly better value per advertised megabit. If you need some recommendations as to which NBN 1000 plans are worth checking out, look no further than Dodo and Superloop. The cost per megabit on these two works out to be 13 cents, placing them among the cheapest for the tier.
Is there a third option?
The NBN 750 and 1000 plans don’t exist in a vacuum, however, and NBN Co has been pretty clear that it considers NBN 500 — introduced last September — to be the current sweet spot for most Australian households. So how does the golden child stack up, you ask? I’ve also made it no secret that I consider it the best option for most Australian households, but admittedly, that’s been without these recent calculations.
As we alluded to above, unlike NBN 750 and 1000 plans, most providers do advertise maximum plan speeds for NBN 500, with an average typical evening speed of 499.3 Mbps across 22 providers — equivalent to 99.9% of its potential 500 Mbps maximum.
On a cost-per-megabit basis, however, things don’t look as pretty for my personal fave. With an average monthly price of AU$95.75, the average megabit cost works out to around 19.2 cents, making it substantially more expensive than both NBN 750 and NBN 1000.
With that being said, it still remains the cheapest option in outright monthly terms, with the average NBN 500 plan costing AU$95.75 — AU$10.23 less than NBN 750 and AU$19.20 less than NBN 1000.
As for my top recommendations for an NBN 500 plan, look no further.
Decisions, decisions
So, where to go from here? What these numbers helpfully confirm is that if you do opt for a faster plan, you are getting good value from a purely cost-per-megabit metric — so if you were looking to justify jumping up to NBN 750 or NBN 1000, you can probably stop reading here.
These facts and figures can’t take into account all the subjective-but-important real-world factors that come into play when choosing an internet plan — they can’t, for example, help you determine how much speed your household actually needs.
While it’s now been proven that NBN 1000 plans offer the cheapest cost-per-megabit, that’s only really useful if you actually need gigabit speeds regularly. What you’re ultimately paying extra for, most of the time, is time — specifically, less time waiting for large files (like video games or OS updates) to download.
And with NBN Co recently claiming that average monthly data usage increased to 574 GB per premises — up 13% year-on-year — having a plan that will download all those gigs faster is going to become more and more essential.
For me personally, I’ve decided I can stand to wait a little longer on the one or two occasions a month when that extra speed would be noticeable. It’s hard to justify paying more if the extra megabits are going unused 95% or more of the time.
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