Eight Years of Watching the Pipes
On June 17, 2026, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission published Report 33 — the final edition of its Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program. The program, launched in April 2017 and ultimately tracking eleven retail service provider (RSP) groups across fixed-line and fixed wireless services, was never about regulating what content could flow through the network or mandating traffic-neutral treatment by category. It asked a simpler question: do Australian households get the broadband speeds they pay for?
After eight years, the answer is unambiguously yes. During the March 2026 measurement quarter, NBN fixed-line connections delivered 99.4% of advertised download speeds during peak evening hours (7 pm to 11 pm on weekdays) — up from 98.5% the previous quarter. The share of connections delivering below plan speed in fewer than 5% of tests has fallen sharply: from 13.9% in May 2018 to 5.6% in the final report. The ACCC achieved this result not by mandating how ISPs must treat traffic, but by eliminating the wholesale pricing structure that made under-provisioning economically rational.
The CVC Problem
To understand why this matters, you have to understand Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC) charges — the capacity-based wholesale fee NBN Co levied on retail ISPs for every megabit-per-second of bandwidth they purchased. CVC was, structurally, a congestion tax. Buying sufficient CVC to cover a customer base during peak hours was expensive; ISPs that tried to compete on retail price often under-provisioned, and during the 7–11 pm window — when households collectively streamed, gamed, and video-called — the bottleneck was predictable and systematic.
The congestion was not primarily the product of bad intent by ISPs. It was a rational response to a pricing model that made peak-hour capacity prohibitively costly, particularly for smaller providers competing against Telstra and Optus. NBN Co began phasing out CVC charges starting with higher-speed plans (100 Mbps and above) after the ACCC accepted its Special Access Undertaking Variation in October 2023. Annual reductions followed for lower-tier plans, with charges falling from $8/Mbps in July 2023 to $7 in July 2024 and $6 in July 2025, before reaching zero across all fixed-line and fixed wireless services on 1 July 2026.
The ACCC's decision to conclude the MBA program at the same moment — publishing the final report days before that structural change took full legal effect — was deliberate. The regulator credited CVC's removal with eliminating the bandwidth-bottleneck incentive that had defined the network's congestion problem since the NBN's early roll-out.
What Report 33 Shows
The final report captures strong but uneven results across technology types. FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) connections delivered 100.8% of plan speed during peak hours — marginally exceeding advertised rates, a function of over-provisioning by ISPs newly free of CVC constraints. Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial (HFC) reached 99.2%. The copper-dependent Fibre to the Node (FTTN) technology, still in place for a portion of premises, delivered 94.7% during peak hours — a visible gap attributable to physics rather than pricing.
Fixed wireless also improved materially: the NBN Fixed Wireless Home Fast plan averaged 160.5 Mbps in download speeds. FTTN upload performance remains a weak point at 82.3% of plan speed — an asymmetric limitation baked into copper infrastructure and one no wholesale pricing reform can resolve.
ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey emphasised that the program's conclusion does not end accountability: "Internet providers have a responsibility to deliver a service that meets the speed and performance that they advertise, and the ACCC will continue to take strong enforcement action where we see evidence of misleading claims." Service provider record-keeping rules, network performance monitoring requirements, and the ACCC's enforcement authority over misleading speed claims all remain operative.
The Net Neutrality Lesson
Regulators in the United States, the European Union, and India have all, at various points, framed broadband fairness primarily through the lens of traffic management — specifically whether carriers can discriminate between content types or applications. It is worth steelmanning that framing first: net neutrality rules protect against a qualitatively different threat than under-provisioning. An ISP that throttles a competing video streaming service while prioritising its own over-the-top offering causes a harm that wholesale pricing reform cannot address. In vertically integrated markets, selective degradation is a real and documented risk.
But Australia's NBN is structurally separated. The same wholesale network (NBN Co) serves all retail ISPs on identical terms, eliminating the incentive for selective content discrimination. In that market structure, the primary consumer harm was not discriminatory traffic management — it was congestion economics, and the fix was pricing reform, not content-layer regulation.
The eight years of independent monitoring mattered too. The MBA program gave the ACCC granular, ISP-by-ISP, technology-by-technology, time-of-day data that created competitive and reputational pressure with no equivalent in a blanket traffic-management rule. Consumers could compare their ISP's peak-hour delivery against rivals. The ACCC could identify underperformers and investigate. That transparency — not mandates — drove improvement.
A Structural Template
Australia's approach was slow. CVC charges were introduced with the NBN and took more than a decade to fully eliminate. The congestion they created was avoidable in retrospect, a design flaw in the original wholesale pricing model. But the resolution — sustained regulatory pressure, independent measurement, and ultimately structural reform at the wholesale layer — produced a result most net neutrality regimes have struggled to match by other means.
For policymakers watching throttling complaints and congestion reports in their own jurisdictions, the Australian case poses a useful diagnostic question before reaching for content-layer regulation: is the underlying wholesale pricing structure giving ISPs a reason to under-provision in the first place? If so, fixing that structure will do more for consumers than any traffic-management mandate — and the ACCC's eight-year data record is the evidence for it.