Category: Internet

Superloop vs Aussie Broadband – a 2023 comparison

A few years back, during the 2020 lockdowns, I posted “Moving from Aussie Broadband to Superloop“, which turned out to be one of the most trafficked posts on this site.

A lot has changed since 2023, including me moving from Superloop back to Aussie Broadband for a few months, then back to Superloop. This is what has changed.

The Price
Back in 2020, 100/40 was $109 (Aussie) vs $98 (Superloop) with 6 months at $88. Recently, NBN has reduced the wholesale costs of faster plans to encourage upgrades.. Superloop prices have lowered due to this, now with a 6 month introductory peroid of $75 and ongoing $89 – this $20 – $26 dollar difference is why I switched back and will still reccomend them. Here’s a sign up link (referral link). Meanwhile Aussie has only decreased from $105 to $109.

CVC Graphs
Part of the draw of Superloop was that they published their CVC Graphs for all to see that they weren’t being congested. Since merging with Exetel, the CVC Graphs are disappointingly not available on their public website, however they are still accessible and I will continue to archive them while they are. Because there’s no information out there about this, I have no idea if they apply only to legacy superloop customers or also to Exetel/new Superloop signups. However the ACCC heavily monitor speeds now so it seems unlikely they will be able to get away with purchasing less CVC to cover the price drop/discounting.

The Transfer
It’s still just as fast. I was connected within an hour, and luckily Aussie still will pro-rata your month when cancelling (Superloop require 30 days notice).

No Port Blocking – but opt-out CGNAT
Superloop now by default opt you in to CGNAT – which is annoying if you’re a developer, have a home-lab or play video games. However, you can still opt-out by contacting support (they have chat!). There’s still no port blocking.

Moving from Aussie Broadband to Superloop

Update: See the updated 2023 comparison here

After a few years as a happy Aussie Broadband customer, I have decided to move to Superloop. This is a quick summary of my experience.

The Price
Aussie Broadband recently announced they are increasing the price of their 100mbps plans by $10 a month. This means that an unlimited 100/40 plan is $98 for Superloop vs $109 for Aussie. Couple it with a referral code/link and you can get it for $88 for 6 months (here is my referral link). Aussie broadband have never been the cheapest provider, but this new hike is uncompetitive.

Superloop
Superloop has copied the Aussie Broadband playbook as a premium NBN provider. They publish daily CVC graphs, which aren’t as detailed as Aussie Broadband’s but are good enough for you to identify if they are not provisioning enough CVC to your POI. Like Aussie Broadband there’s no lock in contracts and extra connection fees, which is a great way of knowing that if they do something like increase your plan costs or have a decline in service quality, you can easily move without penalty.

The Transfer
Churning was ridiculously quick. There was no need to cancel my connection with Aussie Broadband, I simply signed up on the Superloop website and within 5 minutes the connection had been swapped over with no noticeable connection interruption. No need to talk to anyone. One annoying thing is that the only payment methods they offer are Credit Card and BPay, so Credit Card is the only automatic way of paying – luckily though there is no surcharge for this.

No More CGNAT or Port Blocking
Something annoying about Aussie Broadband is that when you sign up or move house you need to wait until the connection is active, then contact their support to remove CGNAT (which messes with things like online games) and unblock incoming ports (important if, like me, you do some web development type stuff on your network). I was pleasantly surprised that Superloop hand out Dynamic IPv4 addresses by default and doesn’t engage in port blocking.

Similarly to my Aussie Broadband CVC Archive, I have started archiving Superloop’s CVC graphs too.

Aussie Broadband CVC Archive

Aussie Broadband is a great NBN internet provider. They are the only one that posts daily CVC Utilization graphs which are the only real way you can see if you’re going to get peak time congestion. After suffering congestion under other ISPs I moved to Aussie and haven’t had any speed slowdown

Unfortunately for whatever reason they don’t offer historic CVC data, they only display the previous day’s, I’ve kindly started backing it up so that Aussie users can see historic CVC data. All this data belongs to ABB and I take no responsibility for its accuracy. But seriously, they are great and you should switch to them if you can.

See the archive here.