Your network
From the street to your screen
Two pictures explain almost every internet problem. The first is how the service reaches your home, and where it can fail on the way. The second is what happens to it once it is inside.
1. Out in the street
A cutaway of your street. Choose your connection type, then select a numbered marker to see what goes wrong there, what you would notice at home, and who can fix it.
Your connection type
How to recognise FTTP
A white NBN box on an inside wall with a thin fibre lead going into it, and a second grey box outside.
Typical delay to a server in your nearest capital: 3 to 12 ms.
Lights on the NBN connection box
Power and Optical are green (Optical may flicker), and nothing is red.
- A red Optical light means the box has lost its fibre signal. A red Alarm light means the box itself has a fault. Both are for your provider to log.
- No lights at all usually means no power. Newer boxes also have a button that switches the lights off, so press it before assuming the worst.
- No light on the data port your router uses means the service is not active on that port, or the cable to the router is unplugged or faulty.
- On older boxes, a data-port light that is green rather than orange means the router has linked at only 100 Mbps: suspect the cable.
Where to test first
Plug a computer into the data port on the NBN connection box that your router normally uses.
A test taken here leaves your router and Wi-Fi out, so it shows what the connection itself delivers.
How the technologies measure up
Real measurements from homes around Australia. Fibre to the Premises leads on every count: it delivers its full plan speed in the evening, has the fewest services that fall short, the fewest long outages and the shortest delay.
| Connection | Evening speed % of plan | Fall well short % of services | Long outages % lasting 10+ min | Delay milliseconds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fibre to the Premises | 100.8% | 4.3% | 7.3% | 5.6 |
| Cable (HFC) | 99.2% | 5.6% | 16.9% | 10.8 |
| Fibre to the Node | 94.7% | 10.7% | 23.9% | – |
| Fixed Wireless | 83.8% | – | – | 41.7 |
| Starlink | – | – | – | 26.2 |
Source: ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia, final report (June 2026), measured in March 2026. "Fall well short" means services that almost never reach 75% of their plan speed. A dash means the report did not publish that figure for that technology. Fibre to the Curb was not reported separately.
2. Inside your home
Once the service is through the wall, the rest is yours: the router, the Wi-Fi it creates, and any cables. Tap anything in the picture.
Tap any part of the picture. Bars show how much Wi-Fi signal reaches each device.
Getting in from outside
Follow one request through your router, step by step: sharing one address, port forwarding, and why CGNAT blocks it.
Port forwarding and CGNATDifferent problems, different causes
Slow is not the same as laggy, and neither is the same as dropping out. See what each one means.
Problems explainedWhich cable is which?
Fibre, coax, Ethernet and old telephone wiring: how to tell them apart, and what each can and cannot do.
Cables and sockets