Netflix Compares ISP Streaming Performance

boustrophedon writes "The Netflix blog compared streaming performance among 20 top ISPs for the past three months. A Netflix HD stream can provide up to 4800 kbps, but the fastest American ISP, Charter, could sustain only 2667 kbps on average. Most Canadian ISPs beat that, with champ Rogers providing an average of 3020 kbps. Clearwire, Frontier, and CenturyTel were in the doghouse with under 1600 kbps."

Comments

Re:Wrong.

[Rinnon]

I've got Verizon FiOS, and though I know it's not that common, but I can get steady 3.7 MB/s streams.

I'm not going to suggest that you are incorrect, but I am going to suggest that your single piece anecdotal evidence is not nearly enough to discredit the report Netflix put together.

Reverse the tables

[MrDoh!]

Very nice. Rather impressive to pre-empt the ISP's.
"well, your competitor is able to provide better speeds to more customers, why are you whining? Oh? AND You charge more for lower service? Interesting. Well, lets let your customers decide for themselves with more facts who they want"

It'd make sense at this point for an ISP with a bit of sense to make a nice deal with Netflix to improve things here, then everyone wins.

Re:Reverse the tables

[Mousit]

...Well, lets let your customers decide for themselves with more facts who they want"

Though unfortunately for many customers (the majority I'm sure), "who they want" is a choice between that ISP or nothing, so it doesn't help them too much to simply tell them hey, they're getting screwed.

However, I would like to see this broken down into smaller areas. By region, or even by city, rather than just the ISP as an overall average. I'd be very, VERY curious to see if the very same ISP performs significantly better in areas where there's some actual competition going on.

That would be nice to wave around "look here, here's measured evidence of what they're doing in areas they don't have to compete".

As an aside, I already kind of see this in my area. I have Time Warner broadband. In my personal location, they're the only choice; even DSL is not available to me. The highest service available is 15Mbps and I average 5-8 most of the time. However, in the sections where Verizon FiOS is also available and competing? Why, suddenly Time Warner's got a 50Mbps service available which averages 35-40! Imagine that..

Ah Rogers

[Kris Warkentin]

Yeah, my cable modem is stupid fast....only problem is, running full tilt I can go through my monthly bandwidth cap in eleven and a half hours.

Fortunately, for the moment, the overage cap is $50 so if you download a bunch some month you just say, "Woohoo, unlimited bandwidth." For example, in January I downloaded 750MB which put me 625MB over my cap and would have cost an extra $780. Ridiculous no? And now the CRTC (equivalent of FTC) has ruled that the major ISPs are allowed to pass usage based billing fees onto third party providers which means there will be no more unlimited plans and the billing cap will likely go away.

Basically, Rogers and Bell want you to watch their channels, not use Netflix, AppleTV, etc. And the wretched hive of scum and villany known as the CRTC is letting them do it.

Not much point in fast internet if you can't use it.

Re:Wow Verizon is around 2k?

[RevWaldo]

There's Verizon FiOS and Verizon DSL. Is the measurement for FiOS, DSL, or both?

.

I'm not exactly color blind...

[astern]

...but how in the hell is anyone supposed to pick the colors out of those graphs, at least three of them are the same shade of sky blue.

I'd like to see this redone as the graph is certainly compelling, just a little bit more readable.

Different Services need to be split

[cwtrex]

The different connections need to be split.

For example, Verizon needs to have:

Verizon DSL 768kbps - 1Mbps
Verizon DSL 1.5Mbps - 3Mbps
Verizon DSL 4Mbps - 7Mbps
Verizon DSL 10Mbps - 15Mbps
Verizon FIOS 15Mbps
Verizon FIOS 25Mbps
Verizon FIOS 50Mbps

Obviously a low end DSL connection is not going to be the same as those who can order the 10-15Mbps DSL connection. And it is likely that the DSL 10-15Mbps connection is going to be different from the FIOS 15Mbps.

To group all of those connections into one Verizon line is completely misleading. And if they didn't take measurements from all of those connections, then then that makes the results even more suspect as the graph doesn't specify what type of connection they chose to test with.

Re:These numbers are averages, so they're bullshit

[papasui]

I'm gonna toss this out there. I've been designing isp networks for the last 10 years, including some of the ones in the list. I haven't seen an area that only has a DS3 as it's backbone in about 5 years, and even then it was 3 of them. And yes, I have worked in some extremely rural areas where the entire subscriber base has been less than 100.

please use real speeds

[KiloByte]

only problem is, running full tilt I can go through my monthly bandwidth cap in eleven and a half hours.

We badly need a "truth in advertising" law that would make it illegal to label a "100Mbps connection" with a 5GB monthly cap as anything above the 16331bps it really is (yes, less than 16kbps, this is not an error). Providing a bigger burst is ok but only if that's clearly marked as such.

Toss in something about the scam that lets ISPs call 100Mbps down/128kbps up by the bigger number. If you want to use just one number, you'd need to print the lower one. Anything else is deceiving the customer.