Update: I decided to be a guinea pig. While I care a lot about my internet, I care more about my investment with Aussie and I wanted to get a gauge of the experience/key differences.

Weirdly enough, there was an NBN outage in my area at the time, so I used that as an excuse to call Aussie and ask what the go was. I had moved my service to Buddy hours earlier and the member could see this. The interesting thing was, given Aussie had moved my service to Buddy already, the staff member palmed me off (nicely), suggesting I need to get in contact with them. I played dumb and asked if Aussie could help given they owned Buddy, but he indicated they were essentially two different businesses and I was shit out of luck.

So I checked out Buddy’s website – the only way to get in touch was live chat. This was still an actual person based onshore and in typical Aussie form they were excellent. The porting process wasn’t perfect; they had to do a few things on their end and I had to move the NBN cable to a different port but live chat support rectified the problems encountered.

Are the speeds different? Nope. Still flawless, as is the ping and reliability of the connection.

My takeaway from this is Aussie will not be providing standard phone assistance to Buddy members, so the experience is a lesser one in that respect. While Buddy and Aussie's plans are similar right now in terms of speeds on offer, that will change due to factors like plan speed upgrades (e.g. NBN 100 speeds going to 500Mbps) and the launch of the NBN 2000 speed tier. This will mean Aussie remains the destination for the very high speed end of the market (where the better margins are) while Buddy will focus on competing on more traditional speeds leveraging off Aussie’s fibre infrastructure. 

In time, there is a chance Buddy could overtake Aussie by market capture. Most users, at least for the next five years or so, are likely to keep traditional speeds (50 to 100 download) unless NBN make changes. If Buddy is able to maintain Aussie's strong brand, be price competitive with peers and better the margins of those around them, they will increasingly look appealing for a good portion of the market and Vocus, Optus and Telstra will have a difficult time competing with a business that is both cheaper and actually liked by customers. It will be really interesting to see how the relationship between Aussie and Buddy develops; Aussie needs to make sure it offers enough point of difference to remain compelling to the top end of the market.