A ranked, plain-English checklist for Australian bill-payers — the cheapest, highest-impact fixes first, each grounded in ACCC and NBN Co guidance.
Fixing slow NBN starts with knowing what is actually slow. Run a speed test during the evening busy period (7pm–11pm), note your download, upload, ping and jitter, then compare that against your plan's advertised speed. If you have not yet worked out the root cause — congestion, wiring, Wi-Fi, hardware or plan tier — read why your NBN is slow first, then return here for the fixes. These are self-service steps you can do yourself; this page does not lodge a complaint with your provider or the TIO on your behalf.
Work through these fixes in order — free and instant first, paid or provider-side last. Most slow-NBN problems are solved before step five, and each step tells you what to check next if it does not help.
Power off for 30 seconds, then on. Clears session drops and re-syncs the line — the single most common instant fix.
Plug a device directly into the modem with an Ethernet cable and re-test. If wired is much faster, the bottleneck is Wi-Fi, not the NBN line.
A big evening drop points to busy-hour congestion, which the ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia report tracks as typical evening speed by tier.
Move the router central and elevated, away from walls and microwaves. A router more than four to five years old may not support your full plan speed.
If wired evening speeds sit near your plan's advertised rate but still feel slow, the plan tier itself may be too low for your household.
If wired evening speeds fall well below the ACCC-benchmarked typical evening speed for your tier, contact your provider with dated test results.
A speed test returns four numbers, and each one tells you a different thing about where a fix should go. Download speed is what most plans advertise — compare it to your tier's advertised rate. Upload speed matters for video calls and cloud backups. Ping (latency) measures responsiveness in milliseconds and affects gaming and calls more than raw download. Jitter is how much ping varies; high jitter causes stuttering video even when download looks fine. If your wired download during the evening sits well under your advertised tier, the ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia report (2026) is the benchmark to check your provider against, because it publishes typical evening speeds each NBN tier should realistically deliver.
Before you keep chasing a fix, check what your connection type can physically deliver. FTTP (fibre to the premises) and HFC can support the highest tiers, while FTTN (fibre to the node) speed depends heavily on the copper distance from the node — a long line may cap below NBN 100 no matter what you do. FTTC sits between them, and Fixed Wireless and Satellite have their own realistic ceilings, especially in the busy evening period. If your technology type physically limits your line, no home fix will lift it — see realistic NBN speeds by technology type for the full breakdown before you upgrade hardware or your plan. Verify current tier availability with NBN Co, as tiers change (NBN 12 is legacy and being phased out).