The short answer
What a Point of Interconnect actually is
When the same internet provider is brilliant for your neighbour and hopeless for you, the missing piece is almost always the Point of Interconnect, or POI. The NBN has 121 POIs, the physical spots where each retailer's network plugs into NBN Co's. Here is the part nobody mentions: a retailer buys its pool of shared bandwidth separately at every single POI, as its own line item. So one retailer can pour bandwidth into the POI that serves the inner city and starve the one that serves an outer suburb 40 km away. Performance is local to your POI, not national. This is exactly why "best NBN provider" lists are unreliable, why a mate across town raves about a plan that crawls at your address, and why the only honest number to compare is the Typical Evening Speed at your location, not a national average or a tier label.
Here is the core takeaway in one line: the NBN funnels your traffic through one of 121 Points of Interconnect, and because your retailer buys its shared bandwidth separately at each POI, your real-world speed is decided locally at your handover, not by any national reputation the retailer has. That single idea explains two things people get wrong: they trust "best NBN provider" lists that average over a whole country (your POI is invisible in that average), and they take a friend\'s glowing review as proof a plan will be good for them (your friend is usually on a different POI). Compare the Typical Evening Speed at your address, and you are comparing what your POI will actually deliver.
Reframe the assumption: there is no single "this provider is fast" answer, because a retailer is not one network but 121 local bandwidth decisions stitched together. The provider that wins your suburb may lose the next one. Ask not "who is best?" but "who holds the highest evening speed at my POI?" That is the only question your wallet should care about.
The blind spot
Why "best NBN provider" lists steer you wrong
Most articles ranking NBN providers do one of three unhelpful things, and each one hides the fact that your performance is set at your POI.
First, they crown a single national winner. They average a retailer\'s speed across the whole country and declare it the best, as if it performed identically at all 121 POIs. It does not. A retailer can be excellent where it provisioned generously and poor where it skimped, and a national average smears those two realities into one misleading number.
Second, they treat word of mouth as proof. A friend says a provider is fantastic, so you sign up and find it congests every night. Nothing went wrong with the advice; your friend is simply on a different POI with a different bandwidth decision behind it. Their experience was never transferable to your address in the first place.
Third, they blame "the NBN" for evening slowdowns. When a line crawls at 8pm, the easy story is that the network is overloaded. But the NBN carries your tier speed to the POI fine; what congests is the shared bandwidth your retailer chose to buy at that POI. Calling it an NBN fault lets the retailer off the hook for a spending decision that is squarely its own.
How the POI system is built, piece by piece
Expert analysis: why your POI decides your speed
121 handover points, and your address is locked to one
The NBN is a wholesale monopoly: NBN Co owns the access network and never sells to you directly. Instead it hands your traffic to your retailer (an RSP, or Retail Service Provider, such as Telstra, Optus, Aussie Broadband, TPG, Superloop or Mate) at one of 121 Points of Interconnect. These POIs sit mostly inside existing telephone exchange buildings and are scattered across every state and territory, from City South and Parramatta in New South Wales to Geelong in Victoria, Woolloongabba in Queensland and a single POI serving Darwin. Your address is permanently mapped to one of them. Everything upstream of that POI is NBN Co; everything downstream is your retailer.
Retailers buy shared bandwidth at every POI, separately
Here is the mechanism that decides everything. To serve customers behind a POI, a retailer must buy a pool of shared bandwidth (its technical name is CVC, Connectivity Virtual Circuit) at that POI, and it buys it POI by POI as 121 separate purchasing decisions. There is no single national tap. A retailer might pour CVC into the POI covering a dense, profitable inner-city catchment and run a thin pool at a growing outer-suburban POI where it has fewer customers or tighter margins. Buy generously at your POI and your NBN 100 line holds near 100 Mbps at peak; buy stingily and the same line slows badly when the neighbourhood logs on after dinner. The congestion is not in the fibre, it is in the size of the CVC pool at your handover.
Why a national reputation cannot predict your address
Because CVC is bought per POI, a retailer is really 121 small networks wearing one brand. Its national reputation is an average of all of them, and an average tells you nothing about the specific POI you sit on. A provider can sit near the top of a national table while badly under-provisioning the POI that serves your street, and a smaller telco that connects to only a handful of POIs can beat everyone at the ones it actually cares about. This structural reality is why the Typical Evening Speed (TES) exists: retailers are required to publish the download speed you can expect from 7pm to 11pm, and it already bakes in the CVC decision at your POI in a way a star rating never can.
The 2025 upgrade raised the ceiling, not the POI rules
From late 2025, NBN Co lifted the wholesale speeds on eligible Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) and most Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) lines at no extra wholesale cost, pushing the Fast tier toward 500 Mbps, Superfast toward 750 Mbps and Ultrafast toward 2000 Mbps, while Fibre to the Node (FTTN) copper lines got none of it. But a faster line still funnels through the same POI, where the CVC pool decides whether the boost survives the evening peak. A wider pipe into a starved handover still chokes, so the upgrade makes the per-POI bandwidth question more important, not less. The ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia programme tests real homes and reports which retailers hold their speed at peak, which is the closest public proxy for how well each one provisions its POIs.
Interactive explainer
POI congestion explainer
Set how many users share your POI at peak and how much shared bandwidth (CVC) your retailer bought for it, and watch the modelled evening speed move. It shows the truth most rankings hide: the tier sets the ceiling, but the retailer\'s per‑POI bandwidth choice drives the congestion.
See how your POI shapes a single NBN 100 line at 8pm
A simplified model of how CVC per active user at your POI throttles evening speed. Illustrative only.
What is happening on the POI tonight?
Modelled evening speed on an NBN 100 line
Notice the tier ceiling never moves: it is always NBN 100. Only the retailer\'s per‑POI bandwidth and the load on the POI move the speed you experience, which is the whole point of comparing the Typical Evening Speed instead of the tier name.
Assumptions: a simplified model where evening speed = min(100, CVC per user x a peak-demand factor), capped at the NBN 100 tier; full peak and fast growth each tighten the available headroom. Real outcomes depend on the retailer\'s actual CVC, the POI\'s real user count and your connection technology. Sources: NBN Co CVC wholesale model, ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia, Canstar Blue 2026.
| POI scenario | What the retailer did | Congestion | Evening speed | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Well-provisioned POI | Retailer buys generous CVC per customer here | Low | ~95 to 100 Mbps | Holds near the tier even at 8pm. |
| Average POI | CVC sized to typical demand | Moderate | ~80 to 95 Mbps | A small evening dip most people never notice. |
| Under-provisioned POI | Same retailer, thin CVC at this handover | High | ~40 to 70 Mbps | Drops sharply when the suburb logs on after dinner. |
| Congested fringe POI | Growing area, CVC not kept up with demand | Severe | ~25 to 45 Mbps | An NBN 100 line that feels like NBN 50 every night. |
What this looks like in real homes
How the POI trap plays out for real households
The mechanics above are not theory. They are exactly how Australian households end up misjudging a provider and overpaying:
The recommendation that did not travel
Someone moves suburbs and signs up with the provider their old neighbour swore by. At the new address, on a different POI, the same plan congests every night. The advice was sound for the friend\'s POI and worthless for the new one, because nobody mentioned the handover sitting silently between them.
The growing fringe suburb left behind
A new estate fills up faster than the retailer tops up the CVC at the local POI. Early movers had great speeds; a year later the same plan crawls at 8pm as hundreds of new homes pile onto a pool that was never enlarged. The household blames the NBN, when the gap is a bandwidth decision their retailer has not revisited.
The national "winner" that lost the street
A buyer picks the provider topping a national speed table, assuming the crown applies everywhere. At their specific POI the retailer runs lean, so they get an evening speed well below the headline that won the award. The ranking measured a country; their bill pays for one POI.
The free fix hiding in plain sight
A frustrated household compares the Typical Evening Speed of a few retailers for its actual area and switches to the one that provisions its POI best. No new cabling, no install, a similar monthly price, and the evening stutter clears. The fix was matching the retailer to the POI, not buying a bigger tier.
The insider insight
A retailer is not one network, it is 121 local bets
Here is the part most NBN guides never say out loud. When you ask "who is the best NBN provider?", you are asking a question that has no national answer, because the retailer you are picturing as a single company is in fact 121 separate bandwidth decisions wearing one logo. It can bet big on the POIs where the customers and the margins are, and bet thin on the ones where they are not. Your evening experience is decided entirely by which of those 121 bets your address happens to sit behind, and that is invisible in every star rating, award and national table you will read.
The non-obvious truth: there is no such thing as a fast provider, only a provider that bought enough CVC at your POI. The households that get the best value stop reading national rankings and instead compare the Typical Evening Speed each retailer publishes for their own area, cross-checked against the ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia results. Because internet has no price cap like electricity\'s DMO, the gap between a retailer that provisions your POI well and one that starves it is wide and entirely on you to detect.
The practical consequence: never judge a provider by its national reputation or a friend\'s review. Judge it by the evening speed it delivers at your POI, the one number that already reflects the local bet it made.
Grounded in the analysis
What you should actually do about your POI
Specific moves that follow from how the POI system is built, not generic advice.
Compare evening speed, not reputation
Throw out the national "best provider" lists. For each retailer you are considering, read the Typical Evening Speed it publishes and cross-check it against the ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia results, because that figure already reflects how it provisioned the POIs.
Treat local word of mouth as local only
A neighbour genuinely near you is likely on your POI, so their experience is worth far more than a review from across town. Ask people on your street or in your estate, not a national forum, before you trust a recommendation.
Trial it, then switch if your POI disappoints
Most NBN plans are month to month with no lock-in, so the cheapest real-world test is to try a retailer and watch the 8pm speed for a fortnight. If your POI congests, switch to a higher evening speed with no new install or cabling.
Want the full picture first? Read our NBN plans guide, run an internet speed test to see what your POI delivers right now, or check whether home wireless broadband sidesteps the issue at your address.
Current figures, last updated 2026-06-16
Indicative Australian POI and NBN figures for 2026. Sources: NBN Co wholesale CVC model, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Measuring Broadband Australia programme, and Canstar Blue 2026. Evening speeds vary widely by retailer, by the POI your address maps to, and by your connection technology.
The bottom line
Why your POI matters more than any national ranking
The NBN\'s 121 Points of Interconnect are the quiet reason internet performance refuses to behave like a national league table. Because every retailer buys its shared bandwidth at each POI separately, the same brand can be a star at one handover and a laggard at the next, and your evening speed is decided entirely by the local bet sitting behind your address. So ignore the "best provider" headlines and the across-town reviews, compare the Typical Evening Speed where you actually live, and lean on the ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia results. With the 2025 upgrade pushing more speed through the same POIs and no price cap to rein in the laggards, knowing that your speed is local has only become more valuable in 2026.
Common questions
A Selectra expert answers your POI questions
A Point of Interconnect, or POI, is the physical handover spot where a retailer's own network connects to the NBN. There are 121 of them across Australia, usually housed in telephone exchange buildings, and your address is permanently mapped to one of them. Your home traffic travels over the NBN to your local POI, and from that point onwards your retailer carries it to the wider internet. The POI matters because every retailer has to buy its pool of shared bandwidth separately at each POI, so the spending decision your provider makes at your specific POI is what shapes your evening speed.
Because you are almost certainly on different Points of Interconnect. A retailer buys its shared bandwidth (called CVC) separately at each of the 121 POIs, so it can provision one POI generously and another thinly. If your friend across town sits on a well-fed POI and you sit on a starved one, the same plan from the same retailer behaves like two different products. This is the single biggest reason "this provider is great" word of mouth is unreliable: their experience is local to their POI, and yours is local to yours.
Indirectly, yes, but not in the way people assume. The distance to the POI is not the issue, the NBN is built to carry your line's tier speed to it regardless. What matters is how much shared bandwidth your retailer chose to buy at that particular POI relative to how many customers it serves there. A POI that is under-provisioned for its demand congests in the evening peak; a well-provisioned one holds the tier. So the POI shapes your speed through your retailer's bandwidth decision at it, which shows up in the Typical Evening Speed.
Ignore national "best provider" rankings and compare the Typical Evening Speed each retailer publishes, because that number reflects real congestion rather than the tier ceiling. Cross-check it against the ACCC Measuring Broadband Australia programme, which tests real homes and reports which retailers hold their speed at peak. Then lean on local word of mouth from people genuinely near you, since they are likely on your POI. Because most plans are month to month with no lock-in, you can also just trial one and switch if the evening speed disappoints, with no new install.
Often, yes. The largest retailers connect at all or most of the 121 POIs and run their own backhaul to them, while some smaller telcos connect at fewer POIs or buy aggregated access through a wholesaler. Neither model is automatically better for you: a large retailer can still under-provision the specific POI you sit on, and a focused regional telco can be excellent at the handful of POIs it cares about. What counts is the bandwidth and the evening speed at your POI, not the size of the logo.
It raised the ceiling but not the rules of the road. From late 2025 NBN Co lifted the wholesale speeds on eligible Fibre to the Premises and most Hybrid Fibre Coaxial lines at no extra wholesale cost, pushing the Fast tier toward 500 Mbps, Superfast toward 750 Mbps and Ultrafast toward 2000 Mbps. But a faster line still funnels through your POI, where your retailer's shared bandwidth decides whether you actually see the boost at peak. A bigger pipe to a congested handover still congests, so the POI question matters more after the upgrade, not less.
