NBN 500 is the new broadband sweet spot — here’s why I recommend a 500Mbps plan for most Aussie households

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.

If you’re currently shopping around for a new NBN provider or plan and your home has a fibre connection, in my opinion the sweet spot when comparing plan value is NBN 500, which, as the name suggests, offers maximum speeds of 500Mbps — a massive speed boost over the next tier down (NBN 50), and more than enough bandwidth for most Aussie homes.

Not only does it provide 10x faster speeds than NBN 50, on average it costs just AU$6.74 more per month and equates to just AU$0.20 per megabit. (Comparatively, while the cost per megabit does continue to decrease as you move up to faster tiers; the drop between NBN 50 and NBN 500 is the biggest one — and for most Aussie homes, the extra cost of NBN 750, 1000 or 2000 is hard to justify when it comes to practical benefits).

500Mbps is more than enough bandwidth to accommodate multiple users and devices at the same time with few interruptions, even for homes with moderately demanding internet use. It’s enough speed to allow for 4K streaming on multiple screens, online gaming and large game downloads, and conducting video calls when working from home — all simultaneously. Having that extra wiggle room means that even with numerous people doing data-intensive activities shouldn’t noticeably impact regular everyday use, like social media, web browsing, or streaming YouTube.

If your household includes devoted gamers, opting for an NBN 500 plan can be especially transformative, ensuring that downloading new games or large patches completes significantly faster than on slower speeds. I’ve put together the table below based on three popular online games with varying download sizes so you can see how radically NBN 500 changes things.

As you can see, while NBN 500 might fall in the middle of this range, it can be the difference between minutes and hours when downloading larger titles. I think that all those practical improvements and minimal cost increase over slower plans add up to make NBN 500 the undeniable sweet spot when it comes to Australian internet in 2026.

If you’re considering switching, I’ve found three of the best NBN 500 plans available right now below.

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