Join The Club
The Australian PC Awards announced its 2026 winners in March, and secreted among the obvious prize categories—for motherboards, CPUs, storage and monitors—was a new award category recognising the best NBN providers.
Superloop has long been recognised as being among the best options for gaming and high speed performance in Australia. It takes pride-of-place as the best NBN 1000 option in my round-up of the best NBN plans for PC gaming. That's mainly because, in addition to some of Superloop's gaming-centric strengths (more on that below) it's extraordinarily affordable: for example, right now its 1,000 Mbps plan is discounted down to AU$79 a month for the first six months, before returning to a still-competitive AU$109 a month.
So it's perhaps no surprise Superloop took out the award in the Gaming NBN category at the Australian PC Awards. But what makes it a good gaming provider?
There's a fair amount of publicly available, objective data that can help make the case. Take Steam's own global traffic map which, among other things, lists download performance by ISP. Superloop currently comes second in the "average download rate" chart at a speed of 155.9 Mbps. That's proof that a lot of users who prefer high speed connections are going with Superloop, and that it delivers the speeds it promises.
Meanwhile, the latest ACCC broadband performance report lists Superloop as the third best low-latency provider from a total of nine, with a low average ping rate of 8.8ms during peak hours, and 8.4ms off peak. If you play online games where latency matters—think CS2, Overwatch 2, or Apex Legends—you're going to need ping under 30ms. Superloop covers that with ease.
Silky smooth
Those are the raw stats, but Superloop has other strengths. It has dedicated subsea fibre cables which makes hopping on servers based in Asia or the Northern Hemisphere far less painless. If you play an online game without Oceania servers—looking at you Lost Ark—then this will prove appealing.
Superloop also allows users to opt out of CGNAT. This tech basically lumps hundreds of customers under the same IP address, mostly in the name of behind-the-scenes efficiency and to account for the fact that we’ve run out of IP4 addresses. But it can also introduce several problems for an online gamer. Some huge online games, like GTA Online, are known to throw up error messages and empty lobbies with CGNAT. The tech can also introduce extra—albeit for most, negligible—latency. While some providers charge to disable CGNAT, Superloop will do it for free: all you have to do is call them.
NBN 1000 is very fast, but if it's not enough—perhaps you've got a 150GB download, and your family is streaming in three different rooms, all at 4K—Superloop offers five free Speed Boost days a month. These bump you up to the next highest speed tier (or NBN 1000 in the case of the NBN 500 plan) for 24 hours, and can be quickly activated via the Superloop app or website.
With all those features you'd expect Superloop to be among the more expensive ISPs, especially at the 1,000 Mbps price point. But the truth is that its NBN 1000 plan is among the most affordable, even when you take any introductory discounts out of the equation. The same is true for NBN 500, which is what most people—even gamers—will likely gravitate towards: right now, it’s AU$69 a month for the first six months, and then AU$95 per month, a price that’s generally far better than less feature-rich ISPs.
So yes: the Australian PC Awards selected wisely for its "gaming" and "high speed" categories. If you happen to value both of those uses, it makes an extremely strong case for best value too.
