Should gamers choose Superloop for high-speed NBN? 5 things to know before signing up

For online gamers, faster downloads are appealing, but a good NBN plan depends on more than download speed alone. Superloop offers multiple gaming-focused features, but their value depends on how you use your connection.

To help, we’ve looked at Superloop’s higher-speed tiers and gamer-friendly options, as well as when paying more for a faster plan may be worthwhile.

TL;DR

• Superloop’s faster NBN plans can reduce download times for large game installs and updates, while My Speed Boost lets eligible services temporarily upgrade to a faster NBN speed tier for 24 hours at a time.
• Superloop uses gaming-optimised network infrastructure that can give Australian traffic a more direct route to gaming servers in major overseas markets, potentially helping to reduce latency.
• Higher-speed Superloop plans give households more bandwidth to share, reducing competition for capacity when gaming overlaps with other internet use such as 4K streaming.
• In 2026, Superloop received awards and recognition from reputable organisations such as Canstar, Finder and Tom’s Guide across areas including value, reliability, trust, service, gaming and high-speed NBN.
• In the ACCC’s 2026 testing, monitored Superloop NBN services averaged 101% of their advertised download rate during busy hours.

1. How much difference does a faster Superloop plan make for gaming?

The main improvement a faster Superloop plan will make for gaming is to reduce how long large games and game updates take to download.

As a simple example, a 50GB download could take over an hour on NBN 100, around 15 minutes on NBN 500 and roughly 7 minutes on NBN 1000. There’s a good argument, then, for signing up for a faster Superloop NBN plan such as the 500Mbps Family Max plan — it means you can spend less time waiting for downloads to finish and therefore more time gaming.

What’s more, many Superloop NBN plans offer an advantage over offerings from other providers: they include a free tool that allows you to upgrade your plan download speeds for a short period. Called My Speed Boost, this feature lets customers with eligible NBN plans temporarily upgrade their plan to a faster speed tier for the next 24 hours. Depending on the plan, you can receive up to five included Speed Upgrade Days each month, bank up to 30 days for later use, or purchase additional days if you run out. You can also purchase days for AU$2 each on some slower plans that don’t include any days as standard. In most cases, using a Speed Upgrade Day will move eligible services up to the next NBN speed tier for the following 24 hours – the exception is the Family Max NBN 500 plan, which, when upgraded, jumps up two tiers to NBN 1000 speeds.¹ Upgrade Days can be activated immediately, or scheduled for a big game release or update.

The exact plan speeds available to you will depend on your location and NBN connection type, so use Superloop’s address checker to see which speed tiers are available at your address.

2. Does paying for a faster Superloop NBN plan improve ping?

Paying for a faster Superloop NBN plan does not necessarily improve gaming pings. The ACCC’s tests of gaming latency on the NBN in 2023 found no relationship between a user’s NBN speed tier and the latency of their connection, so slower plans from the same provider can perform just as well as faster ones when it comes to playing games. The most consistent factor causing increased latency was physical distance — the further away you are from the game server, the higher the latency. In other words, paying for more bandwidth can shorten download times, but a faster speed tier won’t typically reduce gaming ping speeds on its own.

Across the fixed-line NBN services tested, the ACCC also found little variation in latency across different providers, including between peak and non-peak hours.

Source: ACCC Broadband Performance Data, June 2026. Latency was measured as the round-trip time for data to travel between participating households and the ACCC’s Australian test-server infrastructure and back. The figures above are averages across all hours and the busy evening period.

The low latency and variation in these ping speed results show that, for gamers, ping times within Australia should generally not be an issue for households with fixed-line NBN connections.

Your NBN connection type can still affect latency, however. Wireless NBN is generally much slower than wired NBN, for example. In the ACCC’s June 2026 Broadband report, NBN fixed-wireless connections averaged 41.7ms across all hours and 43.5ms during busy hours, compared to an average of 6.9ms across all hours and 11.6ms in busy hours for fixed-line connections.

There’s one important catch here — extra internet bandwidth can still help reduce in-house competition for the connection. That headroom can make a notable difference if you’re trying to game while other people in your household are using the internet intensively too. On a slower NBN 25 plan, for example, several simultaneous 4K video streams or large downloads can use most of the available bandwidth, which can increase gaming latency while the connection is under heavy load. That’s one key reason why NBN Co now considers NBN 500 (as typified by Superloop’s Family Max plan) as the de facto best speed for mainstream Australian households.

Does packet loss affect gaming?

For gamers on any NBN service, packet loss can make online games feel less responsive, cause instability or, in more severe cases, lead to disconnections.

In the ACCC’s June 2026 fixed-line NBN testing, 87.8% of tests recorded no packet loss at all, while another 7.1% recorded less than 0.1% packet loss and 2.1% fell between 0.1% and 0.2%. Only 1.1% of tests recorded packet loss of 1% or more, which is the level the ACCC says can cause problems for internet use, including gaming. In contrast, 79.7% of fixed-wireless tests had zero packet loss, while 1.8% recorded packet loss of at least 1%.

The takeaway here is that packet loss isn’t something most gamers need to worry about on the NBN. The ACCC doesn’t break down the data by packet loss cause or results from individual connections, but there is a 2024 ACCC PDF report that gives a little more insight into packet loss by connection type.

• FTTP packet loss: 0.120%
• FTTC packet loss: 0.138%
• FTTN packet loss: 0.186%
• HFC packet loss: 0.194%

These are just average results, but FTTP also had the narrowest spread of results between the households tested. This data doesn’t tell us exactly what caused the packet loss though, or if it was concentrated in certain problem areas or connections.

If you suspect packet loss on your own connection, use a browser-based tool like Cloudflare’s Speed Test to check. Make sure to test multiple times over a few days, including during the evening. If possible, use Ethernet rather than Wi-Fi, or if you can’t, stay as close to your router as possible, as Wi-Fi can sometimes have its own packet loss issues that could contribute to the results.

3. What specific benefits does Superloop NBN offer for gamers?

For gamers, Superloop offers direct connectivity to key gaming networks and servers across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the US. This can give gaming traffic a more direct route and reduce the number of intermediary networks it has to traverse before reaching the server.

We don’t have to take Superloop’s word for it either, as PeeringDB records Superloop as connected at locations across the same key regions where it can exchange internet traffic directly with other networks.

While this doesn’t guarantee lower latency in all games — actual pings will still vary depending on game, server location and your location — it does clearly demonstrate that Superloop actively seeks to develop and maintain peering connections to critical regional servers.

Superloop also offers a way to opt out of CGNAT, which is an internet provider technology that allows multiple customers to share a public IPv4 address. Most gamers admittedly don’t need to worry about CGNAT, but it can interfere with some gaming or other home-server setups that need their own public IP address to operate, so Superloop offers a static IP for $5 per month.

4. Is a faster Superloop NBN plan worth it for a busy household?

A faster Superloop NBN plan can be worthwhile when multiple people are intensively using the internet connection at the same time, because there’s more bandwidth to go around.

NBN Co’s connected-device guidance for homes explains that every online activity draws on the household’s available bandwidth, so heavy use on one device can leave less capacity for everyone else. A faster NBN plan will also generally finish large downloads sooner, reducing the amount of time the device doing the downloading competes with gaming, streaming and other latency-sensitive household traffic for bandwidth.

Upload capacity matters too, particularly if you engage in activities like livestreaming while gaming. For example, Superloop’s NBN 50 plan¹ offers 20Mbps of upload bandwidth. While just playing online games may only use a fraction of that capacity, livestreaming in higher video qualities can consume a significant share of that 20Mbps total, potentially increasing latency or contributing to stream stuttering and buffering.

5. How does Superloop NBN compare on price, value and performance?

When it comes to NBN price, value and performance, Superloop has a mix of competitive plans, recent industry recognition and positive ACCC broadband results. That recognition includes Canstar’s 2026 Outstanding Value High Speed NBN Plans award. Tom’s Guide gave Superloop 4.5 stars in its review, praising the fast speed, well-priced NBN plans and low latency for gamers. And Finder’s 2026 broadband satisfaction survey commended Superloop for value, reliability, trust and service.

In the ACCC’s June 2026 Broadband report appendix tables, which use data captured from real Australian households, Superloop NBN services averaged 101% of their advertised download rate and 91% of their advertised upload rate during the busy evening periods. In other words, downloads averaged above the full plan rate even in peak times, and uploads were still above the advertised evening speed.

With NBN Co having rolled out significant speed upgrades to its network in September 2025, the sweet spot for many gamers is NBN 500, as it offers a considerable step up in bandwidth versus the next speed down (NBN 50), while faster speed tiers arguably offer diminishing benefits for gaming itself. As of 16 September 2026, Superloop offers its Family Max (NBN 500/50) plan¹ for an ongoing price of AU$95 per month and its Lightspeed (NBN 1000/100) plan¹ for AU$114 per month. For new customers, there are also discounts for the first 6 months.¹

FAQs

What else can I do to improve my gaming experience with Superloop NBN?

If you’re gaming on a Superloop NBN plan, you may be able to further improve your experience by making a few changes to your home network and gaming setup. Your plan and provider are only part of the picture, so here are a few things to check:

• Use a wired Ethernet connection where practical: Ethernet avoids the added variability of Wi-Fi by giving your gaming device a direct link to the router. If a wired connection isn’t feasible, a well-positioned mesh Wi-Fi setup, such as the Amazon Eero 7 options available on eligible Superloop plans, can be a practical alternative. Wi-Fi performance will still depend on elements like device placement and technical capabilities.
• Schedule large downloads: If you know a major update is coming and you’re on a slower plan, schedule it outside your normal game playing time. Downloading a major game update or another large file while you’re either away from home or not doing anything too bandwidth-intensive means the download isn’t competing with your game for bandwidth when it’s time to play.
• Update your software: Poor in-game performance can look like a network issue, but in some cases outdated software, drivers or a pending console update may actually be responsible.
• Check your firewall settings: An improperly configured firewall can block apps or required ports, which can prevent a game from connecting properly, even when the broadband connection itself is working normally.
• Use QoS if your router supports it: Depending on the router, activating the Quality of Service (QoS) feature may let you prioritise certain devices, applications or types of traffic. QoS can help reduce latency under load by managing queued traffic, but it does not increase the overall available bandwidth, and its effectiveness depends on the router and total network load.

Should gamers choose Superloop?

Gamers may find Superloop a good fit if they regularly download large games and updates, share their connection with other heavy internet users, or would make use of features such as My Speed Boost. If low latency for online gaming is a priority, Superloop’s gaming-optimised network may also be relevant. More direct routing to gaming servers and services can help reduce the potential for higher pings, although the result still depends on the game server, its location and the route your traffic ultimately takes.