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Are you looking for your next NBN plan? Let me help you!By way of introduction, I'm Tom's Guide's resident broadband expert, and every month I collate and analyse NBN plans from over 30 providers to find the best NBN deals. IHMO, there's a lot to consider when shopping for a suitable NBN plan, but one common factor that gets overlooked is speed.The conversation around what NBN speed tier you have at home can be a difficult one to navigate. Finding a suitable plan means being realistic about what speeds you'll actually use, over what you’d ideally like to pay. You may find you have too many internet-connected devices (or humans) living in your household and your current plan isn't cutting it, or conversely, you may be overpaying for a fast plan that you actually don’t need.Regardless of where your household fits in the NBN speed pie chart, there's no denying that Aussies have been embracing faster and faster internet speeds over the last few years. As per the ACCC's data, there are now over 3 million active connections for plans offering 100Mbps download speeds and faster. That number has actually quadrupled in the past 14 months, largely due to NBN Co's wholesale speed boost in September 2025.Those speed upgrades came in the form of three new speed tiers — NBN 500, NBN 750 and NBN 2000 — which have helped turbocharge Australia's average internet download speeds to 162.34Mbps. A big contributor to that increase was the fact that two of the new tiers, NBN 500 and NBN 750, were wholesale increases to the existing NBN 100 and NBN 250 tiers. What that means is that customers on full-fibre connections at home — either FTTP or HFC — should have been automatically migrated to these faster speeds for free by their NBN provider. And in most cases, these new tiers cost the same (or only fractionally more) than the slower counterparts they’ve replaced.
