Slow NBN? Just switching providers may not be enough to resolve your internet speed problems – here's what you need to know

NBN Co’s significant upgrades last September put high-speed broadband within easier reach of more Australians. The popular Home Fast II tier leapt from 100Mbps to 500Mbps, accompanied by new Superfast 750Mbps and Hyperfast 2000Mbps plans.

In many cases, the speed upgrade to 500Mbps even came as a free automatic NBN upgrade for the hundreds of thousands of households that were signed up to a 100Mbps plan and connected to the NBN via either fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) or hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) technologies.

With the bandwidth to rapidly download files, games and stream 4K to multiple devices simultaneously, NBN 500 is the new sweet spot in terms of price and performance. Realistically, it should be more than enough to satisfy most Australian homes.

TL;DR

● Superloop provides blazing‑fast NBN that keeps up with everything you stream, download and game, even in peak time.

● Future‑ready Amazon eero Wi-Fi 7 modem-routers are included at no cost on eligible Superloop plans, so your Wi‑Fi can keep up with your speedy NBN service.

● NBN speeds are also dependent on your connection technology, but thankfully many homes can upgrade to faster connections.

When it comes to value, the average cost of an NBN 500 plan tracks at just under AU$96 per month (as of August 2026), according to Tom's Guide’s market analysis. That’s actually only around AU$2 more than the average NBN 100 plan costs — despite being five times faster.

Meanwhile, ‘entry-level’ NBN 50 plans currently average around AU$91 per month — again underscoring that it makes little sense to opt for a slower plan when the massive boost of NBN 500 is only a few dollars away.

Beyond NBN 500, the faster plans are tempting but don’t offer as much of a practical improvement as moving from 50 or 100Mbps to 500Mbps. Raw speeds might climb, but a 750Mbps connection won't make much difference for day-to-day usage like browsing, streaming or even gaming because faster NBN services don't typically provide lower latency, rather they exist to increase overall bandwidth and higher maximum download speeds.

When it comes to performance and reliability, NBN 500 plans deliver on their promises and rate highly in the ACCC’s quarterly Broadband Performance Data report for June 2026. Homes on fixed-line NBN 500 plans are getting an average of 500.3Mbps during busy hours, while NBN 750 plans sit at 720.2Mbps.

Choosing a great NBN plan and quality provider are key first steps in ensuring you get great NBN service, but there are other considerations. Many homes aren’t making the most of their NBN speeds, with outdated Wi-Fi routers often the culprit, according to the ACCC.

Can a high-speed Superloop NBN plan help improve internet speeds for demanding households?

Choosing a high-quality provider and suitably speedy plan is the first step in ensuring your home internet can keep up with your household’s needs, and Superloop's Family Max NBN 500 plan¹ is a great starting point, offering enough bandwidth to cater to even highly demanding Aussie homes.

Superloop maintains its own high‑performance fibre optic network and has engineered it for low latency and reliability, so your internet connection feels instant and offers consistent, stable performance, even during peak-usage periods.

Punching above its weight, Superloop outperformed the industry heavyweights to be awarded Australia’s Fastest Fixed Network by Ookla’s Speedtest across the whole of 2025 and again in Q1-Q2 2026.² To take the title, Superloop provided a median 304.01Mbps download speeds and 50.82Mbps uploads. That’s well ahead of providers like Telstra and Optus, which respectively scored 105.17Mbps and 117.28Mbps for median downloads and 36.88Mbps and 36.14Mbps for uploads. In a practical sense, these results show that demanding Australian households are choosing Superloop for their NBN plans – and enjoying the consistently fast broadband speeds they expect.

Even in the busiest hour of the day, Superloop ensures your home never has to wait for the internet. It ranks among Australia’s top NBN providers for average download and upload speeds during peak evening times. Superloop again outdoes both Telstra and Optus during the busiest hour of the day according to the ACCC’s June 2026 Measuring Broadband report, delivering 98.7% of possible plan speed compared to 98% for Optus and 97.5% for Telstra. Plus Superloop continues to rank extremely highly in Steam’s Australian download statistics – with Superloop currently sitting in second place of the top 10 Australian broadband providers.

Given those consistently impressive speed results from independent third-party sources, it’s perhaps no surprise that Superloop also won both the Best High-speed NBN Provider and Best Gaming NBN Provider over at our sister-site TechRadar’s 2026 Australian PC Awards.

It’s not just performance benchmarks where Superloop excels, either. Customers haven’t been shy about praising the telco in their online reviews, where it averages 4.8 out of 5 stars from over 16,000 reviews on Product Review, and 4.6 out of 5 stars across 3,000+ Trustpilot reviews.

How does Superloop help ensure its customers achieve the fastest possible speeds?

Beyond offering a first-class NBN service, Superloop helps customers optimise the performance in their own home by including high-speed Amazon Eero Wi-Fi 7 modem-routers at no cost on eligible plans.³

Slow NBN speeds are more often due to reliance on outdated home networking gear, rather than faults with NBN Co's network, according to the ACCC.

Older Wi-Fi modem-routers, especially those still running Wi-Fi 4 or 5, can struggle to handle bandwidth demands beyond 100Mbps, so even if you’re paying for a faster plan your in-home router might be bottlenecking it. In fact, some older routers only include a 100Mbps Wide Area Network (WAN) port for connecting to your NBN box. This means a super-fast 500Mbps plan will be throttled to just a fifth of its possible speed before it even makes it past your front door.

Upgrading to a Wi-Fi 7 router can greatly improve wireless performance, and all Wi-Fi 7 routers should include a 1Gbps or faster WAN port to eliminate the bottleneck that stops you making the most of 500Mbps+ NBN plans performance. You’ll also want to ensure there’s at least a Cat 5e or Cat 6 Ethernet cable running between your modem-router and NBN box, as an old Cat5 cable can’t handle the speeds and is another potential bottleneck. If you select to receive an Eero 7 router from Superloop, a Cat 5e cable is included in the box for this purpose.

Wi-Fi signals on older routers can also struggle in large, multi-storey homes — especially if they need to pass through brick walls rather than plasterboard.

We recommend placing your Wi-Fi modem-router up high and in a central location, but if that doesn’t fix the problem, Superloop’s Eero 7 routers support mesh Wi-Fi, which lets you optionally add additional routers to expand your wireless coverage area and get it where it’s needed.

What other factors should I check to ensure I get the best possible speeds on Superloop NBN?

Beyond choosing Superloop as your provider, the physical nature of your NBN connection is the factor that’s likely to have the biggest effect on your broadband internet’s speed and reliability, so knowing which type you have is key.

Australia’s NBN infrastructure is made up of a mix of multiple technologies – and some are decidedly superior to others. While NBN Co has been gradually rolling out free⁴ upgrades to many of the older and slower parts of its network to use end-to-end fibre optic infrastructure, individual households don’t typically have direct control over how their homes are connected to the NBN — at least not without forking out thousands of dollars to run fibre optic cables at your own cost.

As a general rule, the closer fibre optic cables run to your home, and the less old copper wire is involved in the pipeline, the better the speed and reliability your provider is able to deliver. This is why fibre to the premises (FTTP) is the gold standard, as it brings fibre optic cabling right into your home.

Hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) NBN connections are the next best option. Like FTTP, HFC can support the new Hyperfast NBN 2000 plans (typified by Superloop’s Hyperspeed plan, which offers typical evening download speeds of 1,700Mbps¹), which as of last September has become the new top speed offered to consumers.

Meanwhile, fibre to the curb (FTTC) runs fibre to your nature strip, before relying on your old copper phone line to cover the final leg into your home. Fibre to the node (FTTN) relies on copper running to a neighbourhood ‘node’ that can be up to several streets away, making it the slowest and least reliable fixed-line NBN technology. The limitations of FTTC and FTTN mean the best they can handle is the ‘Home Fast’ NBN 100 tier — if you’re on one of these older technologies, you’ll need to organise a fibre upgrade in order to sign up for a fast 500Mbps service such as Superloop’s Family Max plan.

Thankfully, many homes relying on FTTN and FTTC can now upgrade to FTTP for free as part of NBN’s ongoing program. These upgrades are generally ordered through your internet provider, so you can check your eligibility and even schedule in the upgrade directly from Superloop.⁴

Superloop has a wide range of fast and great-value home NBN plans to suit a variety of Australian household needs and budgets. To find a plan that’s right for you, check out the full NBN range at Superloop.