Paying for fast NBN but getting underwhelming speeds? Here's how to ensure you're getting top performance – and the key factors you might be overlooking

When NBN Co unlocked a bevy of speed upgrades and new plans to the National Broadband Network in late 2025, it opened up very fast internet to millions of Aussie households.

The updated range of plans were led by the new NBN 500 tier, which NBN Co now considers to be the best option for most consumers and offers 10x the speed of the most popular tier, NBN 50.

Even if you’ve moved up to an NBN 500 plan, however, you may not currently be able to achieve your new plan’s top speeds — and figuring out whether the problem is with your NBN provider, the setup of your Wi-Fi, old cabling or personal devices, or possibly even the time of day you’re using the internet can be a little baffling if you’ve never asked these questions before.

The short answer is that the cause of internet slowness could be a mix of all of these factors. In this guide we’ll run you through what you need to consider when troubleshooting your internet speeds, from choosing a reliable broadband provider, ensuring you have an up-to-date router, and a range of physical and time-based factors that may introduce dips and bumps into your NBN experience.

TL;DR

Getting the best possible speeds from your NBN plan often requires making sure multiple elements are working in harmony, from choosing a fast and reliable NBN provider to having a suitably recent modem-router, as well as placing and configuring that router for top performance.

How can I determine what my internet speeds should be?

Your internet speeds rely on a combination of factors including your underlying NBN technology, but in order to make comparison easier, every NBN provider is required by law to publish their ‘typical evening speeds’ (or TES) for any plan they offer. That particular number’s important because the hours between 7pm to 11pm are generally the busiest for internet use (particularly on weekdays), and the extra demand can cause speeds to drop for all users. How much they drop will depend on your particular provider.

Let’s use Superloop’s ‘Family Max’ NBN 500¹ plan as a good example of what to expect from a fast plan from a well-regarded premium provider. Like most NBN 500 plans, it’s theoretically capable of maximum speeds of 500Mbps downloads and 50Mbps uploads, and for that important peak period, Superloop advertises typical evening speeds of 500/40. This means that, even during the demanding evening hours, you should still be able to achieve the full 500Mbps download speeds on Superloop, and the plan’s peak-hour upload speeds are only slightly impacted, with a claimed 40Mbps — or 80% of the maximum possible.

How can I test my internet speed?

Once you’ve determined what your plan’s theoretical maximum speeds should be, the next step is to check what kind of real world speeds you can achieve. Testing your internet speed is generally an easy process, and quality providers often have a straightforward portal on their website specifically for their users to test their connection — Superloop’s Speed Test page is a great example, and you don’t have to be a Superloop customer to use it. Starting the test is just a matter of clicking the big ‘Go’ button, but before you do, here are some tips and tricks to ensuring you get an accurate result:

• You’ll get a better real-world picture of your upload and download speeds by using a laptop or PC as the test device and connecting it to the router via a wired (aka Ethernet) connection. This eliminates any bottlenecks you might experience over Wi-Fi, which is more easily disrupted by the surrounding physical environment or the distance of your test device to the router.
• Keep in mind that this is a peak performance test; it doesn’t reflect the speed at which you’ll be able to connect to every server and service on the internet.
• We’d advise testing your speed multiple times at different times of day and night to get a better overall picture of any external impacts, such as it being a peak usage period. A single slower test might just be a one off, but a persistently slow connection points to an ongoing problem that needs addressing.

Does my NBN provider matter when it comes to internet speed?

Choosing the right internet provider can definitely make a difference to the quality, reliability and speed of your connection, even when comparing plans of the same type. If you want to see how your current provider fares and/or you’re looking for a high-quality alternative, the ACCC’s quarterly Measuring Broadband reports are a good source of objective, unbiased statistics across multiple metrics.

There are three key areas of the report that we recommend checking when comparing NBN provider performance:

• Plan speeds by provider
• Latency and web page loading time
• Daily outages

Using Superloop as an example again, it performs very well in those three benchmarks, delivering impressively high download and upload speeds (even across busy periods), the third-best latency result of all the providers compared (note that lower is better here, as it means a quicker response time), and the lowest rate of daily outages overall, with that number not changing between the last two tests.

In other words, with Superloop you can generally expect to experience fast download speeds, very responsive online gaming and excellent reliability with fewer outages than most other NBN providers.

Its plans optionally include an Eero 7 mesh-compatible modem-router (or and Eero 7 Pro on the 2Gbps tier), ensuring that customers have the best possible shot at getting the speeds they pay for, making it a worthy consideration when you’re choosing an NBN plan.

How does my modem-router affect my internet speed?

A quality NBN provider is only half the equation when it comes to your online experience — your choice of modem-router can also make a significant difference to the speeds you get.

The modem-router is especially important if you’re on a 500Mbps or faster plan, because it can often end up being the bottleneck that prevents you from using your internet connection to its full potential, especially for any devices that connect over Wi-Fi – which in 2026 is basically all of them.

For example, if you’re paying for an NBN 500 or faster plan, you’ll ideally need to pair it with a Wi-Fi 7 router. That newer protocol should generally be fast enough to ensure your home network has the necessary bandwidth to match your internet connection. These devices can be expensive to purchase outright, however, so if you want to avoid forking out hundreds of dollars to replace your current router, it’s wise to seek out a provider that offers a Wi-Fi 7 modem-router when you sign up for a new plan. Most providers will let you pay off a bundled router in installments over 1-3 years — which is another good reason to choose a telco whose routers use the newer Wi-Fi 7 technology.

Superloop is, again, a good example here — as soon as the new NBN speeds rolled out, it upgraded its modem-router offerings to speedier Wi-Fi 7-capable Amazon Eero 7 models and they’re available at a low cost to any new customers and can be paid off over either 12 or 24 months.

Why does the NBN get slower at night?

Internet speeds can slow down at night because the network as a whole often gets substantially busier after everyone's finished work for the day. This evening peak period is the one time when many of us go online to do bandwidth-intensive things like stream video, download and play games, or scroll through social media, often with multiple devices on the go at the same time.

You may not be able to control what everyone else in your household is doing online (let alone neighbourhood), but there are a few things you can do to make sure your speeds are as fast as they can be during the busy evening peak period, such as:

• If you’re frequently experiencing evening slowdowns, check what everyone’s doing online when this occurs — it may be that one or two users are hogging the connection thanks to bandwidth-intensive activities.
• If the latter turns out to be the case, ask if you’ve purchased a plan with enough speed to support your household’s actual day-to-day needs. While NBN 50 may still be the most popular tier (as of May 2026), it’s far from being the best value. On Superloop, for example, switching up from NBN 50¹ to NBN 500 is just $10 more per month (AU$85 compared to AU$95).
• Opting for a well known, broadly respected provider whose performance claims are verified in the ACCC’s quarterly reports should also help ensure any peak-hours slowdowns are minimal.

Are my connected devices (e.g. computer, phone, tablet, TV or games console) limiting my internet speeds?

The type and number of connected devices you’re using can significantly affect internet speeds on those devices, or even your household as a whole. Consider these key questions when assessing how devices might impact your speed:

• Are you using older devices that only support slower Wi-Fi standards? Even if you’ve upgraded to a newer Wi-Fi 7 router, your older personal devices may not support the full speeds that this newer protocol supports. As you might expect, that means they won’t be able to achieve the fastest speeds themselves, but for some setups older wireless gear can cause bottlenecks for other devices. A slow Wi-Fi extender, for example, can bottleneck the speeds of the personal devices that connect to it for internet access.
• Can you connect via a wired Ethernet connection instead? One way to ensure fast speeds (often even on older devices) is to directly plug them into your router; this helps eliminates any Wi-Fi speed issues and can significantly affect latency as well.

Does it matter where I place my router?

The position of your modem-router can absolutely have a significant impact on your wireless performance and, in turn, the speeds you can achieve when accessing the internet.

Poor placement can mean your router’s sending Wi-Fi signals into areas that aren’t useful to you — like the floor, rather than into adjacent rooms.

Generally speaking, placing your router in an elevated position and towards the middle of your home (or in the center of the areas that need fast speeds) can help optimise the reach and speeds of Wi-Fi signals. This means that your incoming NBN connection can reach further and go faster, even if you’re using them some distance away.

If you know you’ve got thick interior walls or obvious Wi-Fi ‘dead zones’, you may also want to consider a mesh wireless system, such as the Eero 7 devices that (optionally) come with Superloop’s NBN plans. Adding one or two additional mesh ‘extender’ modules can help you work around those kinds of problems by coordinating with each other to expand the Wi-Fi coverage area.

Can changing my wireless router settings help boost NBN speeds?

Tweaking router settings can make a substantial difference to your NBN speeds under certain circumstances.

While you can’t directly alter the NBN speeds coming into your home (beyond switching to a faster or slower plan), if you live in a crowded area like an apartment block or small house that’s in close proximity to numerous other homes or businesses, the odds are very good that you’ll see lots of competing Wi-Fi networks when you try to connect.

That means that your and your neighbours’ networks physically overlap. While that’s often unavoidable, it becomes problematic when too many routers are configured to use the same network channels. This can lead to compromised performance, with Wi-Fi radio packets bouncing off each other like dodgem cars. Thankfully, there are some steps you can take to minimise that impact, such as:

• For older routers, check the specific channels that you’re using; changing these in your router settings (if your router supports this) can help avoid conflicts and maximise speeds. Some routers even have the ability to scan for other local Wi-Fi networks and adjust the channels they’re using to reduce overlaps.
• For newer routers that support Wi-Fi 7, enabling a feature called MLO (Multi-Link Operation) lets you aggregate the 2.4GHz/5GHz/6GHz bands for optimal performance.
• If the interference is particularly bad, you can try setting up your router to run distinct 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz networks, if supported. While this may restrict which devices on your wireless network can talk to each other, it does give you the ability to use the different frequencies for different things. For example, 2.4GHz networks typically have more reach but less speed, and are therefore better for smart home devices like smart lights and sensors, while the greater speed of 5GHz and especially 6GHz can make a huge difference for more data hungry (and latency sensitive) applications like video streaming or online gaming.
• Use a wired Ethernet connection where possible. If your router sits near your TV, for example, then a wired connection to gaming consoles, streaming boxes or your TV’s Ethernet port (if it has one) can often make a noticeable difference.