Leaving lag behind: Why our super low latency is no accident

In a June 2021 report, the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) recorded Superloop’s latency as the lowest of all the Australian residential internet service providers that they tested.

This is the second such report that Superloop has recorded the lowest latency among Australian ISPs, and it’s only the second such report that Superloop’s data has been collected.

So, how do we do it? How do we get our latency so low?

How we do it

The reason why Superloop can offer such low latency is because of what’s known as our backhaul. Basically, we built a whole lot of fibre in the ground and have connected it to NBN’s 121 Points of Interconnect (POI) around Australia. Our fibre creates a shorter path for your data requests to take which means the overall round trip (latency) becomes so much quicker.

(What does 'ping rate' and 'latency' mean?)

Many internet providers rent fibre from other providers, which means the path from A to B and back again could be saddled with some unnecessary pit stops along the way. Those pit stops take precious milliseconds and ultimately slow down the entire process.

For gamers, Superloop’s low latency is especially important, particularly when our fibre network has direct paths to servers in Asia. So when your game doesn’t have a local server set up in Australia, Superloop’s network connects directly to servers in Singapore and Hong Kong.

(How is Superloop's network optimised for gamers?)

With lockdowns happening across Australia and working from home an increasing struggle, latency is also important for remote workers. Video conference calls are especially a nightmare when high latency causes lag and freezes in the connection. With low latency, those lag issues are reduced.

Things are about to get even better too

Superloop is continuing to invest in our network infrastructure.

Recently, Superloop founder, Bevan Slattery announced that the company is investing in new levels of redundancy and resilience to 119 of those NBN POIs. This includes increasing the capacity of POIs that are more than 50km from metro areas.

In real terms, that means if internet goes down at the data centre nearest to you, the network will automatically reroute your connection without you noticing a thing.

These aren’t the most glamorous of upgrades, but these are the kinds of improvements that Superloop can do because we own and operate our own infrastructure and network. We are beholden to no one but the NBN.  

But is there some kinda catch here?

For full transparency, one reason why Superloop performs so well in ACCC’s latency test is due to the way that the test is measured.

(Why does latency even matter?)

The ACCC uses data collected from a cloud-based analytics system called SamKnows, and due to our direct connectivity, SamKnows happens to be very close to our network. This means that the requests for data that SamKnows collects can happen faster when compared to other internet service providers.

How much difference this makes at the end of the day is unclear. It’s not nothing, so it’s worth keeping in mind when assessing the different internet providers and claims. However, when combining this measure along with others, such as CVC capacity (more on this here), we believe that our dedicated backhaul makes a big difference to performance.

Try us and see for yourself. Switch to Superloop and test drive our super low latency internet.