KEY POINTS:
Broadband monitoring company Epitiro, which recently picked up the contract from the Commerce Commission to benchmark the performance of the country's internet performers, has crunched its data collected over the year and ranked the top three performers.
In first place was TelstraClear, second went to Orcon and Slingshot was in third place. The results aren't all that surprising.
TelstraClear serves customers over its own hybrid-fibre network in Wellington and parts of Christchurch so isn't as reliant on Telecom's copper network to reach customers.
Orcon has always had a good reputation for network reliability, though suffered a major email disruption earlier in the year. Slingshot sits on top of the CallPlus infrastructure and CallPlus also has a reputation for reliability, even if its had its own wrinkles to iron out this year.
Epitiro's broadband monitoring currently covers the main centres, so expanding the coverage to the regions may knock TelstraClear off its perch. It's interesting that the company with the biggest broadband user base - Xtra, is nowhere to be seen, while the company that's competed most aggressively this year on price - ihug, doesn't make the top three either.
Do the companies with more customers usually lag behind when it comes to performance? That perception exists for a reason - less customers mean less demand on the resources - everything from wholesale DSL connections to national and international connectivity.
The smaller players are wholesaling a service but are often able to move quicker when something goes wrong.
It's also the smaller ISPs, such as WorldxChange and CallPlus leading the innovation in areas like VoIP and naked DSL.
Still, as Epitiro points out, all of the players are improving their performance and putting more fibre optic cable into the telecoms network makes the service fundamentally better for everyone - the Australians have realised that and are right now figuring out how to build that mutil-billion dollat fibre-to-the-node network Kevin Rudd promised to subsidise.
What was your experience of broadband like this year? Any stand-out players or on the other hand, horror stories that caused you to jump ship to a new ISP?
