Why your NBN is so slow -- explained with toy cars!

So, you've just connected to the NBN, but every time you use the Internet, your connection goes full potato. So, why is your Internet so slow? And why do you have that crushing sense of loneliness every time you're not on Facebook? Well, we can't help you with that last thing. But there is one factor that could be affecting your speeds. It's called CVC and we're here to explain it with toy cars. Claire take it out of the box. I'm not taking this out of the box. I bought it at Graceland. It's worth a lot. What is CVC and why should you care? This is the information superhighway. The National Broadband Network has been built by NDN, the company, but NDN doesn't actually sell you your Internet connection. Retailers like Telstra, Optus, TPG, and iiNet Buy access from NBN and sell it to you, the end user. To get you onto the internet, your ISP or retailer has to pay for two things AVC and CVC. AVC is the flat rate that your retailer pays to get you onto the NBN. Think of it like the car you drive on the highway. The highest speed tiers have a more expensive car while the lower speed tiers have a less expensive car. The next cost is CVC, now that's the fee that retailers have to pay to actually get bandwidth. The more CVC then the more bandwidth that Internet retailers get for their customers. Retailers pay for this bandwidth at exchanges across the country. They're known as points of interconnect. Like old school telephone exchanges, they're the place where the NBN connects to Telstra, Optus, or TPG network and then ultimately to you. Think of them like on ramps for the super highway. So your ISP estimates how many people they think need the NBN of a certain area and pay for as much of this bandwidth with they think they'll need. The more people the wider the on-ramp. The problem comes when internet service providers try to save money by skimping on CVC. If they haven't bought enough bandwidth, you get bottlenecks every time someone tries to go online. Too many cars, not enough room on the road. The problem is you don't know how much CVC your telco is buying. They don't actually tell you. And then they want to **** in much. So they're hoping that Internet users subsidize heavy Internet users. But it doesn't always work that way. Two people with the same ISP on the same speed tier could have totally different experiences on the NBN. If your ISP hasn't bought enough bandwidth at your point of interconnect, everyone at that exchange will suffer when you all go online on mass. Aah! And if nothing changes, it's only going to get worse. We're steaming more Netflix, uploading more stupid videos to Facebook, and connecting more gadgets to the Internet than ever before. We just need a network that can handle it.