10 Key Results From The Whirlpool Broadband Survey


Back in January, we encouraged readers to take part in the annual broadband survey conducted by legendary broadband community Whirlpool. The full results (based on 23,683 responses) have now been published: here’s ten of the most notable findings about the state of broadband in Australia.

Picture by yum9me

Everyone thinks mandatory Internet filtering is stupid

It’s not surprising really: almost 93% of respondents thought mandatory Internet filtering was a bad idea. That’s a view broadly supported by the population at large.

Everyone thinks they can avoid it

43% of respondents said they already knew ways of bypassing the filter, and almost as many were confident they’d be able to learn how to do so.

On the whole, broadband is pretty good . . .

We might be eagerly awaiting the NBN, but two-thirds of customers said they were “very happy” with the reliability of their current connection, and 81% would recommend their provider to a friend.

. . . but we’d like to pay less

A significant minority (40%) think that their current service is too expensive.

Fast could be faster

Amongst ADSL2+ customers, more than half are getting speeds of 10Mbit/s or less. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it shows how theoretical maximum speeds (24Mbit/s in the case of ADSL2+) don’t mean much in practice.

Wireless for the home is some way off

While three-quarters of respondents used a notebook at least part of the time, that didn’t mean that 3G broadband was seen as a viable alternative to ADSL or cable. 63% said they didn’t see it as a viable alternative for home access.

Channel BT is big

53% of respondents used their broadband connection to watch downloaded TV shows. No wonder we’ve stopped watching regular TV.

Ethernet still has a place

There’s nothing like Wi-Fi for convenience, but there’s nothing like Ethernet for speed (and a more fundamental sense of security). Reflecting that, 74.3% had both wired and wireless networks in their home. Only 2.6% of respondents had no home network at all.

Letting Telstra control everything causes problems

While problems with broadband installation weren’t common, the two most frequent reasons cited were failure to activate a phone line or ‘ISP blamed Telstra for some reason’.

If you need support, you’ll be waiting

When calling customer support, 40.5% of respondents had to wait between one and four minutes, 25.2% between five and nine minutes, and 21.2% for longer than that. While four minutes isn’t really that long, it can seem that way when your connection is dead or unresponsive.

Hit the link below for the full results (which include far more detail about individual ISPs) and share your thoughts and interpretations in the comments.

Whirlpool Australian Broadband Survey 2009


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


19 responses to “10 Key Results From The Whirlpool Broadband Survey”

Leave a Reply