If I had a dollar for every time I heard a complaint about slow NBN internet or poor performance, I'd be a rich man!
Unfortunately, most Gold Coast homeowners don't have much choice. In many areas, an NBN connection is now the only practical option. BUT...
Here's the thing. You might be paying for fast internet and your internet provider is actually providing it! n the vast majority of cases, we find the issue with slow or inconsistent internet isn't the NBN connection itself. It's usually how the signal is being delivered to your devices throughout your home.
Here is a list of things we typically check when we attend your home.
1. Distance from the FTTN node
If you’re on Fibre to the Node (FTTN), your last-leg connection is still copper. Every metre of copper between your house and the node costs you bandwidth. Most Gold Coast homes on FTTN sit between 200 m and 800 m from the node — and beyond about 600 m, hitting 50 Mbps becomes physically difficult, no matter what plan you pay for.
Thankfully, in many Gold Coast suburbs such as Nerang, Palm Beach, Mermaid Waters and Burleigh Heads, NBN has been actively replacing older copper connections with fibre directly to homes.
You can check your tech type and approximate node distance at nbnco.com.au/check with your address.
2. WiFi vs ethernet — measure both
“My internet is slow” almost always means WiFi is slow. Run a speed test plugged directly into the router via an ethernet cable, then run the same test on WiFi from the same room. If ethernet is fast and WiFi is slow, your problem is WiFi — not NBN.
Don't worry if you don't know how to do this, that's what we're for.
Call us today on 0452 525 615
Quick rule: If wired speed is within 10% of your plan, your NBN connection is fine. Everything else is internal.
3. Router placement
The single biggest source of slow WiFi we see in Gold Coast homes is router placement. Routers shoved in cupboards, garages or behind TVs can lose 60–80% of their signal to walls, mirrors and metal. Concrete walls (common in Burleigh and Mermaid Beach beachfront builds) eat 2.4 GHz signal alive.
A job we attended in Ormeau last week involved relocating the router out of the garage and into a central room of the home. In the words of our customers review "The internet here was useless! The Internet Magic tech knew exactly what to do and now I can finally stream Foxtel without pulling my hair out every five minutes because of connection failures.".
What we look for on a site visit
- Router central to the home, off the floor, in open air
- No mirrored cabinets, fish tanks or mounted TVs within 1 m
- Antennas vertical (not bent or aimed sideways)
- Modem/router in a position where line-of-sight reaches the rooms you actually use
4. Old or under-spec hardware
If your router was supplied by your ISP three plans ago, it’s almost certainly the bottleneck. ISP-supplied routers from 2019–2021 typically max out around 30–40 Mbps over WiFi even when fed a 100 Mbps connection. We replace one of these every other day.
5. Channel congestion (especially in apartments)
If you live in a Surfers Paradise high-rise, a Broadbeach apartment or any complex with 30+ neighbours, the 2.4 GHz band is a war zone. Modern routers should auto-pick the cleanest channel, but most don’t. Switching to 5 GHz where available, or getting a dual-band router that can balance traffic, often doubles real-world speeds.
6. Background devices hammering the connection
Cloud backups (iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox) running on three computers, a smart TV streaming 4K to no one, two consoles updating in the background, eight smart-home devices, security cameras uploading 24/7 — it adds up. We sometimes find a single Apple TV using 6 Mbps continuously while idle.
7. Modem firmware out of date
Manufacturers patch routing bugs every few months. If your modem hasn’t been rebooted in a year, it’s probably running stale firmware with known performance issues. A scheduled monthly reboot — and an annual firmware check — fixes more “slow internet” calls than people would believe.
If this all sounds like techno babble, don't worry, that's exactly what we're here for. Today we solved an issue for a customer near Broadbeach, Surfers Paradise who couldn't get her brand new modem to work. Her ISP sent out a new modem and forgot to pre-configure it. Our customer had no chance of implementing the fix. We had to call her ISP and do some techo magic things to get it up and running. So don't feel embarrassed if you think your issue is too simple. We all have different skills, and we don't know what we don't know.
For expert in home internet help please call us on 0452 525 615
8. NBN line fault
Lastly, sometimes the connection is genuinely faulty — degraded copper, water in the pit, a damaged drop cable from a recent storm. ISPs don’t always pick this up unless someone lodges a fault. We can run a line test on-site and tell you in five minutes whether your ISP needs to send NBN out.