Is my premises cabling really causing slow speeds?
nbn can be quick to conclude that customer cabling is the culprit for slow speed issues and dropouts — but can the cabling in your house cause such a problem?
In short, yes.
Your internal cabling can make a significant difference to the stability and speed of your nbn Fibre to the Node service.
Let's take a trip back in time, to when our telephone network simply handled plain old telephone services (or POTS for short).
Generally, the wiring inside your home didn't really matter too much — as long as the wires were connected, you could hear the person on the other end.
There were two typical ways in which homes were cabled: "daisy-chained" or "star topology".
So what difference does this cabling make?
The attainable data rates for the daisy-chain and star configurations are shown in the graph below. (The baseline data rates were measured at 86.7 Mbps downstream and 32.9 Mbps upstream.)
As you can see, star and/or daisy-chained cabling can significantly reduce your line's maximum attainable rate (maximum throughput speed).
In this particular study, the daisy-chain configuration saw a 47% reduction downstream and a 1% reduction upstream. In the star configuration, there was a 62% reduction downstream and a 23% reduction upstream.
What can I do?
For the best performance on the nbn Fibre to the Node network, we recommend contacting a local licensed telecommunications cabler to have your home cabling remedied.
New and old homes can both benefit from premises cabling remediation, and nbn frequently requests that a customer's internal cabling be checked to help resolve a fault.