Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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.
If the world isn't beating a path to your door you're doing something wrong.
...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..