The NBN did its job. It replaced the copper network, and for households it was a genuine upgrade. For businesses it’s often the wrong product, sold by default because it’s what’s available and what’s cheap.

We see the result in audits constantly: a company that has grown from eight staff to forty, still on the NBN plan they signed years ago, with degraded calls and crawling uploads treated as facts of life. Nobody reviews the connection until it becomes unbearable, and by then it’s usually been costing money for years.

The problem isn’t download speed

NBN business plans advertise downloads up to 1,000 Mbps, which sounds like plenty. Look at the upload figure instead. On most of those plans it’s 20 to 50 Mbps, shared with every application you run.

A modern business hammers its upload far harder than its download. Cloud backups go up. Files sync up. Your side of every video call and every VoIP conversation goes up. When that narrow upstream pipe fills, everything degrades at once, and it usually fills in the middle of the working day.

Here’s the part that surprises people: there is nothing you can do about it. NBN plans carry no guarantee on upload performance and no remediation when it underdelivers. Speeds are quoted as “typical”, contention with the neighbourhood is by design, and if the connection fails, repair is best-effort with no committed timeframe. There’s no SLA to enforce and no one to escalate to. That’s not a flaw in your plan; it’s the product.

What dedicated fibre actually buys

Dedicated business fibre (also sold as Enterprise Fibre or Ethernet over Fibre) is a different product, not a faster tier of the same one. The speeds are symmetric, so 500/500 means 500 Mbps in both directions. The bandwidth is yours alone, uncontended, around the clock. And the SLA is contractual: uptime guarantees around 99.95%, restoration targets measured in hours, and penalties when the carrier misses them. You’re buying recourse as much as speed.

To make the speed difference concrete: a 5GB file that takes fifteen minutes to upload on a 50 Mbps NBN upstream takes about ninety seconds on 500 Mbps fibre.

When NBN is genuinely fine

We’re not in the business of selling fibre to people who don’t need it. A small office, light cloud usage, email and browsing with the occasional video call: NBN handles that fine, and paying for dedicated fibre would be exactly the kind of over-provisioning we get paid to remove. NBN Enterprise Ethernet also exists as a middle option, with symmetric speeds over NBN infrastructure at a price point between the two. It’s one of several connectivity services we supply and manage where it’s the right fit.

The signals you’ve outgrown it

• Multiple sites on VPNs. Every site’s traffic funnels through the upload of the hub. Asymmetric plans put a choke point exactly where you can least afford one.
• Your business lives in the cloud. If your files, applications and backups sit in AWS, Azure or Microsoft 365, upload speed is effectively your office speed.
• Phones and video run over the connection. Ten concurrent HD calls want 30 to 50 Mbps of clean, jitter-free upstream. That’s most of an NBN plan’s upload gone before anyone opens a file.
• Real-time systems. POS terminals, medical imaging, anything where a lag spike costs money or safety. These need consistent low latency, which shared connections don’t promise.

What it costs, honestly

Dedicated 500/500 fibre generally runs somewhere between $550 and $750 a month depending on location and term, with gigabit services from around $900. Fibre now reaches tens of thousands of Australian business premises, and where it doesn’t, carriers will often build it in for the term of a contract.

Whether that’s worth it depends on your workload, which is a calculation we’d rather do properly than assert in a blog post. The fibre decision is also a favourite spot for overspending in the other direction: businesses paying for gigabit symmetric fibre to run email. We’ve unwound plenty of those too.

Get the decision made properly

Your internet connection is infrastructure, and infrastructure decisions deserve better than a guess. As part of a Telco Health Check we benchmark what you’re on against what your workload actually needs, in both directions. Sometimes the answer is an upgrade. Sometimes it’s a cheaper plan. Either way you’ll know, and it costs you nothing to find out.