Better coffee — and now better NBN? Melburnians may have added another bragging right over Sydneysiders

So of course we had to do a bit of investigating

News By Max Langridge Published 10 August 2026

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Adding more fuel to the fire over which city is actually Australia’s best place to live, those residing in the all-seasons-in-a-day city of Melbourne have a new statistic on their side — and it all relates to fixed-line broadband speed.

Ookla, the company behind the hugely popular Speedtest tool that helps anyone diagnose their home internet speeds, has published its latest Global Index rankings, revealing median fixed-broadband download speeds by country and city.

As a country, Australia is slowly but surely moving up the table. There was a time we ranked as low as 86th, but we now sit at 50th, with a median fixed-broadband download speed of 162.34Mbps.

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That improvement follows NBN Co’s September 2025 speed-tier shake-up, which introduced a 2Gbps wholesale option for eligible FTTP and HFC premises, alongside faster speeds on several existing higher-end tiers. Of course, not every Australian can access 2Gbps just yet — and, as we’ll see, the plan you choose is only one part of the equation.

For context, Singapore takes the crown with a median download speed of 447.75Mbps. One can only dream of a day when that becomes a reality Down Under.

Why the huge gap?

There are several reasons why Australia trails the pack so dramatically — although with 141 other countries clocking slower speeds, things could certainly be worse — and, in my mind, one of the most obvious is that many Australians are still connected to comparatively slow NBN plans.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission publishes a quarterly Wholesale Market Indicators Report that provides an overview of active NBN connections and their download data rates.

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