I had been on Uniti Wireless for some years for home broadband. Costing $79/month, it was pretty good, and is the equivalent of NBN 50/20 speeds. But I really wanted faster uploads, and Uniti recently has had slow down problems, with speeds dropping randomly through the day. And twice this year it’s had outages.
Plus, since I joined Uniti, my street got NBN, opening up more options.
But I don’t understand why it’s so hard to find NBN plans with upload speeds of 40+ Mbps, and why they’re so expensive. You basically have to pay for 100 Mbps or higher downloads to get faster uploads.
Search sites like Finder have the option to look only for 50+ upload speeds, but then all it finds is one 250/50 plan costing $209/month, which is overkill.
Canstar only allows you to filter by download speeds. It does find one 100/40 plan from Belong, which Belong’s own web site doesn’t know about. Very helpful. Ditto TPG. The big companies, Telstra and Optus, don’t even offer fast uploads.
I found a reviews.org page that supposedly highlights fast uploads. Two of the five options listed are only 20 Mbps. Really?
Anyway, after some hunting around, here are a few options I found:
| Provider | Plan Download/Upload | Initial monthly cost | Usual monthly cost |
| Leaptel | 500/50 | $109 for first 12 months | $129 |
| Aussie Broadband | 100/40 | $109 | $109 |
| iiNet | 450/40 | $119.99 for first 6 months | $149.99 |
| Superloop | 100/40 | $75 for first 6 months | $89 |
| Exetel | 100/40 | $74.99 for first 6 months | $88.99 |
I’m sure there are more, but let’s not make the decision harder than it has to be.
As I understand it, Superloop and Exetel are the same company, which is why the pricing is near-identical. I’m somewhat suspicious of the amount of advertising Superloop is doing at the moment, and wonder if they have an influx of customers, what support will be like when something goes wrong.
My old provider, Uniti (using fixed wireless) has been pretty good but continually falls down with poor support when anything goes wrong.
iiNet I’ve used in the past and they were very good for support, and their service includes mobile internet as a backup during outages. But their only plan with 50+ upload is 450 download, which I don’t need, and is way more expensive any anything else.
But I ended up with Aussie Broadband, which has a very good reputation for good support. So far so good. 100+ downloads, 35-40 uploads.
Good by world standards? Probably not.
But fine for AU. I’m happy with that for now.