Earlier in the year, NBN Co announced that they would expand Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC) capacity by 40% during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was — in the short term — a response to the increased pressure on infrastructure due to significant numbers of the Australian workforce migrating home.
In a post earlier today, NBN Co noted that the increased speed has been delivered at no cost to retailers and will continue to be until November 2020:
Following feedback from Internet retailers, NBN Co will extend the 40 per cent additional capacity offer (where available, depending on access technology) at no additional cost to participating retailers (based on the February 2020 baseline) until 30 November for bundled discount plans.
Further to this back end boost, a financial incentive for low-income households needing to get connected has also been extended. This is now available through until 15th of January where NBN Co waive the fees (AU$37.00) to participating retail providers on 25/5Mbps plans.
As part of this, NBN Co Chief Customer Officer, Brad Whitcomb, stated:
Following feedback from internet retailers over the past few weeks, we have decided to extend our offer of additional capacity for another 10 weeks and will be extending further measures to help make broadband even more affordable and accessible to low-income households.
With the new normal seemingly here, it will be interesting to see — come November — whether the CVC expansion remains in place to support the increased load, or whether NBN Co will raise wholesale prices to retailers.
Has the CVC increase resulted in better speeds for your Internet connection?
NBN has been unreliable with many complete cutouts when Telstra have been working on our co-axial cable. Backup 4g in the router is useless as too slow, particularly for upload – useless for video conferencing and soon used up monthly allowance of 12 gig. It takes 2 minutes to cut in .An Optus dongle was too slow at 11 down and 1 up. Phone hot spot was the only way but it dropped down to a 7 up and down which is very slow and much slower than the 21 down and 12 up normally available when not congested. Thinking… Read more »
The CVC increase did not help our speed during peak time at all. We are FTTB. In fact it got so bad we started using our mobile 4G LTE. In the end we disconnected NBN and installed a 4 port 4G LTE router which is faster and less expensive.
$14 v. $55 per month.