We were promised fast speeds and A-grade reliability, but now it sounds as if it is a dream.

Australia currently sits at 62nd in the world for download speeds. For many that come as no surprise, but what’s more shocking is that developing countries such as Kenya and Pakistan are still higher in the ranking than us. These are countries that most of the local residents don’t have the resources to make use of the faster speeds

In Australia, unless you want to buy the shockingly expensive 100mb/s downloading speeds, you have to put up with an average of 33mb/s downloading speeds. Comparing with one of the countries with one of the best internet speeds such as South Korea, where there average downloading speeds is 3 to 4 times more than the world’s average. This means South Koreans are able to work productively and are able to not worry about the internet of not working, I know, you’re probably thinking how lucky they are.

Even worse, you pay for better speeds and you end up not actually reaching to 100mb/s on a regular basis. So why did we switch to NBN and waste so much of our taxpayers' dollars? Well firstly you have been pressured to switch and been given warnings that your existing internet will be suddenly shut off, has that happened, no. Secondly where has the taxpayer’s money gone too anyway, the NBN of course, but why have we not seen any improvement? Well, the government has decided not to install fibre optic cable, which uses light to transmit messages, in other words, it’s faster than your ordinary copper wire.

Our cousin nation of New Zealand sits at 23rd in the world with a shockingly high average of 87.82 MB/s. So remember while you’re enjoying buffering videos, our neighbours 3,841 km away are experiencing smooth sailing videos and web browsing. In addition, 183,000 households cannot even reach 25mb/s. So next time, while you are waiting for a video or just the web to load, you can remember only 3,841 km away you could be experiencing the dream of fast and reliable NBN that actually works. So why does New Zealand have better internet speeds and why is our internet always going out and the cost of repairing it is going out of your taxpayer money even if it’s the governments' mistake of not putting in the necessary cables for it to work.  With this ongoing issue I went out and asked a user of the NBN and this is what they said -

”The NBN is one of the worst decisions the government have made in my opinion. The number of times you pay for a service and it is never able to deliver to the plans that they promised to provide, the connections always going out, having to repair it all the time. There’s just not enough money in the NBN to facilitate for the number of people using it.”

- Morgan Dendle

I think it is clear now that the government and the providers have to do something to improve the internet and meet the standard we were promised to get. In the end, I think the government need to put more money into the technology to facilitate for the high population and land area in Australia. So why hasn’t there been an improvement? Well, the government hasn’t put the necessary cables for the NBN to run properly. So why does Australia have to be the one experiencing the mistake, NBN?