What NBN speed is best for gaming, and does your provider matter? If so, is Superloop a good choice?

If you’re a gamer, faster NBN plans are an appealing upgrade. Physical media is increasingly rare, game download sizes are getting bigger (and even game updates can be hefty), and nobody really wants to spend their evening staring at a download bar when they could be playing.

But choosing the best NBN plan for gaming isn’t quite as simple as just signing up for the fastest connection that your address and budget can handle. While a higher-speed plan can make large game installs and patches much quicker to download, once you’re in a match, factors like congestion, other household members using the connection, and your Wi-Fi setup can cause lag and stability issues.

TL;DR

• Superloop’s Family Max NBN 500 plan offers 500Mbps download speeds¹, helping busy households handle gaming, streaming and big downloads at the same time.
• In the ACCC’s 2026 testing, Superloop’s monitored services averaged 101% of promised plan speed during peak hours, and hit 102.4% for its NBN 500 plans.
• Superloop improves performance by using its own dedicated network infrastructure to connect more directly to gaming servers in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the US.
• Superloop’s Family Max plan includes five Speed Upgrade Days each month, temporarily upgrading the plan from 500/50Mbps to 1000/100Mbps for 24 hours, which can shorten download times for large game installs and patches¹.
• Superloop lets customers who need their own public IPv4 address opt out of carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) — a key benefit for some game- and server-hosting setups.

What NBN speed is best for gaming?

There’s no single NBN plan speed that will suit every gaming household. Even the relatively slow speeds of NBN 50 can handle online gaming when there isn’t much competition for the connection, while faster options like NBN 500 are better suited to big households with heavier use, such as simultaneous streaming and game downloads.

Then there’s the price difference. It’s hard to beat Superloop’s NBN 500 Family Max plan for its compelling mix of performance and gamer-friendly features — especially given it’s only AU$6 more per month than Superloop’s NBN 50 plan’s listing price and offers 10x the download bandwidth.¹

Source: Plan, speed, price and My Speed Boost information from Superloop’s current NBN plans, typical evening speeds and My Speed Boost details, checked 16 September 2026¹.

Keep in mind that NBN 500 is only available on eligible FTTP (full-fibre) and HFC (cable) connections, so make sure you check your address with Superloop’s NBN eligibility checker tool before shopping for an upgrade.

Is NBN 50 fast enough for gaming?

Yes, NBN 50 can be adequate for gaming — with a few caveats. For playing online games, NBN 50 can generally provide low latency and fast ping speeds — the key factors when it comes to keeping your game in sync with the server and other players — but NBN 50 can run into issues due to its low total available bandwidth; 50Mbps can quickly feel limited in a household that has multiple people all using the internet at once.

Large game updates are a good example, as downloading a new title or patch can easily use most or all of that 50Mbps. When that happens, gaming latency can increase and make online play rather laggy.

NBN 50 is 10x slower than NBN 500, and that difference has a big impact on how long a download can take. To put that into perspective:

• NBN 50: A 50GB patch takes over 2 hours to download.
• NBN 500: A 50GB update is done in as little as 15 minutes.

Will a faster NBN plan lower my gaming latency or ping?

A speedier NBN connection won’t normally reduce latency, or ping, in online games by itself, but it still has some important impacts.

The reason is that latency measures the round-trip time for a data packet to travel from your machine to a gaming server and back. Upgrading to a faster plan gives you more total bandwidth, which can reduce download times, but it can’t shorten the distance to the gaming server. So it's no surprise that the ACCC’s gaming-specific testing found that plan download speed did not directly affect game-server latency on fixed-line (wired) NBN services.

Other factors, including longer network routes (such as when gaming servers are hosted overseas), network congestion and poor Wi-Fi reception at home, can add further delay even on faster NBN plans with plenty of download speed.

Does your choice of NBN provider matter for gaming performance?

Your NBN provider can have a direct impact on important gaming factors such as ping speeds. While NBN Co is in control of the underlying access network, your chosen provider is responsible for carrying your traffic onwards to the wider internet — so how a provider manages those internet connections can affect performance either positively or negatively.

In practice, some providers are better at optimising their infrastructure for gaming than others. Differences in how much network capacity they have available and the paths they use to reach game servers mean that one NBN provider can encounter more congestion or take a longer route than another.

That means that two plans that offer the same NBN speed (like NBN 500) can actually give quite different gaming results, even when downloads take a similar time.

Is Superloop NBN a good choice for gaming?

Superloop has a range of gamer-friendly features, so if online gaming is a high priority for your household then it’s definitely worth putting on your shortlist. In fact, Superloop beat out other providers and won our Best NBN Provider 2026 award for gaming.

On the network side, Superloop has direct connectivity to gaming servers in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the US. This means Australia’s gaming traffic has a shorter route, reducing the potential for higher pings. Of course, that doesn’t mean every game will have lower latency, as it still depends on where the server is located and the exact route your traffic takes to reach it.

Superloop also offers a useful perk on some plans called My Speed Boost that’s great for dealing with large game downloads. My Speed Boost temporarily upgrades your speed for 24 hours, and several plans (including the NBN 500 Family Max plan) include five of these Speed Upgrade Days to use each month. You can trigger these from the Superloop app, and on the Family Max plan your connection speed will be upgraded from 500/50Mbps to 1000/100Mbps for 24 hours¹. You can also bank up to 30 Speed Upgrade Days for later use, and even schedule them in advance specifically for big game updates or weekend play.

How does Superloop NBN perform against its advertised speeds?

In the ACCC’s June 2026 broadband report, Superloop NBN plans performed admirably, on average delivering 101% of their promised download speeds during busy hours, while the company's NBN 500 services hit 102.4%. That’s not a mistake — as the ACCC explains, results above 100% are common because NBN Co provides a little extra download capacity above the normal plan speed to help offset network overhead.

As extra context, the NBN 500 Family Max plan offers speeds of up to 500/50Mbps, while Superloop lists 500/45Mbps as the typical evening performance¹. This figure is based on average customer download and upload performance during the peak 7pm to 11pm period.

What should I look for in an NBN plan for gaming?

When assessing NBN plans, you should start by considering how much bandwidth your household actually needs rather than simply choosing the cheapest or the fastest plan available. NBN 50 can be enough if you're not using the connection for anything much other than gaming, whereas NBN 500 gives a family much more capacity to handle varied internet use at the same time.

Remember that not all providers are equal, and the download speed on offer is only one part of the picture. Factors like peak-hour speeds, network congestion and the route your traffic takes to game servers all have a big impact on everyday gaming performance.

It’s also important to compare what features an internet provider offers, and whether they are truly useful to you. In Superloop’s case, extras like My Speed Boost for temporarily faster downloads and the option to opt out of CGNAT if you need your own public IPv4 address can potentially be very handy for gamers.