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Netflix Ranks ISP Speeds
Carnth writes "Netflix will start releasing monthly ISP speed reports for the U.S. Google Fiber ranks at the top. They say, 'Broadly, cable shows better than DSL. AT&T U-verse, which is a hybrid fiber-DSL service, shows quite poorly compared to Verizon Fios, which is pure fiber. Charter moved down two positions since October. Verizon mobile has 40% higher performance than AT&T mobile.' Hopefully this will give consumers a better overall picture on how their ISP performs compared to others."
There's plenty of smaller ISPs that get better speeds than many of these providers. Would have been nice to see them on the list along with the heavyweights.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
These people lie constantly. When I signed up for Charter, I asked if I could run temporary instances of game servers so I could play my favorite games online. They said yes. That's a big lie, they block pretty much every port. I call to talk about this, I get sent to business class support, which ends up saying "We don't block anything over port 8080, so you should be able to run your games just fine."
Nope. Can't connect or host shit on my PS3, or my computer.
Then to boot, I'm paying for 100 mbit down. I can NEVER get more than 30mbit down.
Charter is a business full of false advertising and sheer incompetence. Avoid these fuckers like the plague if you can. As soon as Verizon FIOS is available here, I'm ditching Charter. Fuck those lying sons of bitches.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
How come Google Fiber is MB/s and not GB/s?
One of my pet peeves as a numerate person not impaired by statisto-phobia is the [ab]use of averages. Sure, the mean contains some information. But the standard deviation contains just as much, if not more! Very seldom do I see anything from which sigma could be inferred, yet whenever you collect data for averages, you can easily calc sigma.
In this case, network averages are useful only for advertising and not much use at all for consumers, with the possible exception of some large corporations who might reasonably suppose they have enough users spread evenly so they _on_average_ will see the average.
For individuals, what matters is the service you will see. And that depends with any carrier more on the neighborhood loading and upstream provisioning on that node.
The only real info you might guess from averages, provided you can make some reasonable assumptions about wirespeed, is what percent of a providers customers are under-provisioned. If cable is commonly 6 Mbps and DSL is 3 and they both net 2, cable is horribly cramped in spite of higher bandwidth.
Each of us only has one, two, or maybe three (if we're lucky) options to choose from, does it really matter if some ISP that doesn't serve my area is faster than the ones available to me?
And when they will use html5 for Netflix?
Last time I checked it was silverlight which is pretty much windows (maybe also Mac) only.
If I can't watch it on my Linux box I am not subscribing for such service.
"Hopefully this will give consumers a better overall picture on how their ISP performs compared to others."
Which means jack squat given most people have one broadband option.
OK, I've owned enough fast cars to understand that faster is always better, but in practical terms just how much download speed does anyone really need?
We're using Shaw Cable in Canada, the budget plan, and thus far it does everything we want, including downloading distros and (surely paid for, not pirated) movies in a reasonable amount of time, and streaming video via our Sony BluRay player.
Maybe I'm just an old fart that remembers 300 baud, and the amazing jump to 56k, but really folks, what in God's name are you doing that requires more than cable Internet speed?
(awful rich for Netflix to pretend to be looking out for consumers when their own service rips off Canada customers by offering 1/4 the choices at the same price)
Three Squirrels
That Cox and Suddenlink are almost exactly the same is not a surprise. Suddenlink bought most of the midwest network of Cox when they decided to sell their assets.
If we lived in a tiny country like Sweden or Japan, it would be easy to have infrastructure in place for good internet speeds for all. "Unfortunately" for us, we just have too much room here in the USA.
megabytes? megabits? millibits per siemens?
Maybe someone can answer this, but aren't netflix apps "aware" of the display quality of device they are on? For example, does Netflix on my ipod (640x960) request the same bitrate file as Netflix on my HDTV (1920x1080)?
Because if not, is it really fair to compare a wireless carrier's avg stream speed (mostly serving netflix to smartphones) to that of traditional in-the-ground ISP (mostly serving netflix to dedicated hi-def devices)?
A few problems with this is ADSL is offered for less with different speed options. I have 10mbps. I was on 1.5mbps though until I could afford more. Comparatively I bet more people on DSL aren't willing to pay more which is why they are on it over cable. The fact you have the cheapest option on DSL doesn't mean DSL sucks. it just means your too choice to pay for something that doesn't. I would never switch away from DSL in any area where the service didn't suck (except for maybe fiber). Cable is obviously some peoples only choice. I'm within the town limits now and I was just outside of town prior. I have had fiber and I have had DSL. I have also tested out Cable. Not terribly impressed with Cable (although it varies significantly just as DSL does depending on the area).
If we lived in a tiny country like Sweden or Japan, it would be easy to have infrastructure in place for good internet speeds for all. "Unfortunately" for us, we just have too much room here in the USA.
You can't blame it all on geography, I live in a small, densely populated city (with density exceeding many Japanese urban areas) located very close to Silicon Valley and my only options are Comcast Cable internet or "up to" 3 mbit DSL.
Did they congregate all of the data for these tests? My steady speeds UL/DL are well over this, does HD streaming really only stream at 2.xx Mbps? I sincerely doubt this... Or is this MEGABYTE?
They state MBPS so maybe Megabyte? That would ring true with most non Uverse connections as the standard for most providers is about 14-20Mbps.
How do I get Google Fiber.
I'd prefer to see a rating based on both UPTIME and speed.
A fast internet connection is useless when it randomly goes out every other day/week, as I have experienced in the past with many cable providers. Especially if you rely on the internet to do your job.
You can't blame it all on geography, I live in a small, densely populated city (with density exceeding many Japanese urban areas) located very close to Silicon Valley and my only options are Comcast Cable internet or "up to" 3 mbit DSL.
That's pretty good for DSL here in Silicon Valley. My neighbor who refuses to dump DSL is only getting around 200mbs.
Yes, that was a typo. Should have been 200kbs.
I want data to stream just as fat from a remote site as it does from my local drives. That way, where something is stored isn't relevant, it is all the same speed.
That would take in the realm of 10 gigabit.
Or maybe fully uncompressed video, that could be nice, particularly for games but in general for having a more simplified receiver. Well that's over a gigbit for 1080p 24fps, 8-bit. Going to 1080p 120fps, 8-bit is near 6 gigabits per second. Gets even worse if you want to go 10/12 bit and/or 4k resolution.
Something less ambitious? Ok how about just better HD streaming. Blu-rays are generally in the realm of 25mbps for video, often another 10+mbps for audio. I'd like to stream stuff in that quality, it looks noticeably better than the Netflix HD streams.
Speaking of video streaming I'm hoping to see some better content some day, that'll require more. I'd like a 4k 60p stream. Going to need a lot more bandwidth for that.
10-20mbps Internet works fine these days for most things, but that doesn't mean I can't come up with a lot of uses for better Internet speeds. Until it matches local speeds (which it isn't ever likely too) there is room for more speed.
I live in Los Angeles, which is probably a much more densely populated city than yours, and we have a pretty good selection of internet providers here.
I was one of the first DSL customers in Hawaii. At the time, my non-technical circle didn't see the point. "Always on? 10x faster? 2x as expensive? Whatever for?" Indeed. Based on your (I suspect) tougue-in-cheek comment, I'd note that neither distro d/ls or streaming video would be possible without it.... but we didn't know until we could *could* do it.
In Australia, they're busy debating whether the proposed National Broadband Network of fibre optics links is "worth it". What would you run over it that we can't run now?
It hasn't been invented yet.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I live in the shadow of Google but have AT&T DSL and use it to watch Netflix. In the past six months, performance has deteriorated significantly, dropping from an average of 1.35Mbps to 800Kbps and sometimes less. AT&T has tested the link to the CO and found it meets their service level standards.
I have spoken with other locals who expressed similar problems with Comcast. If you look at the sales of iPads and other tablets, their growth seems to track against this slowdown. Have these new tablets, streaming YouTube, Vimeo, and Netflix, put a strain on the local ISPs? I doubt if theISP's provisioning would keep up with sudden demand.
how many HD movies can be watched each month on each provider without horrific overage charges?
"AT&T U-verse, which is a hybrid fiber-DSL service, shows quite poorly compared to anything else!" AT&T also has horrid customer service. A terrible billing and computer system that cannot keep track of any changes. Plus, the customer service reps lie and are confused on what will happen next. Besides having the worst speed and quality, the "service of their service" is the worst ever recorded. Their phone service, however, used to be good where I live. But I have cancelled due to the other negatives.
comment? It's all in the subject stupid.
I'm not sure what the speeds in the article actually mean - they may be an average capped to the maximum bitrate of a Netflix stream, hence the clustering at such slow speeds around 2-2.5 mbps. The cheap Charter service in my tiny podunk midwestern town gives me 30 mpbs in terms of real performance whenever I connect to a fast server, for instance when I'm downloading something off of Steam.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
According to the US Census bureau, 4 out of 5 Americans live in an urban area. Yes, we have some wide open spaces. But that's what they are: open spaces with no people in them. The vast majority of humans live in clusters that would bring the cost of broadband down.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That is 2-2.5MBps, which is equal to 16-20mbps. They probably are still hitting a bottleneck at Netflix though.
i wonder though, is verizon really faster or does the phonehome of the android phones, using wifi, usually connected to a different network skews the netflix ratings.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The Netflix chart gives a misleading perception of "ranking." Some of these services are tiered offerings, like TimeWarner Cable and AT&T U-Verse, but you can't tell from the chart what percentage of the customers have subscribed to lower-speed service or higher-speed service. It's possible that a higher ranking ISP just happens to have more customers paying more money for faster access -- that doesn't make them a faster ISP.
Does this phonehome thing keep the same IP when switching from cell tower to wifi?
Tomorrow is another day...
Google Fiber has nothing on Chattanooga's epbFI footprint and speeds... this is the message I sent Ken:
Hi Ken,
I saw your latest blog post, and noticed that you included Google Fiber, but not EPBfi. Chattanooga's fiber network is much larger than Google's pilot, and as a customer, I know that I have never received anything less than your highest XL level stream.
Please extract statistics for epbfi.com and epbfi.net to show our statistics.
Thanks,
John
I heard about Chattanooga's fiber and I envy you. I wonder, how many such local internet providers in US having fiber or cable for reasonable prices.
Unfortunately, in Santa Clara, CA we are stuck with Comcast. Sharks. $50/mo for 6/1 Mbps. I hate them. Also home to America's worst customer service among all organizations medium to large size, including IRS. Ha ha. (sourced from wikipedia)
Any idea how to convince local government to organize similar to Chattanooga's internet? We have Santa Clara power, but not internet.
Bullshit. The states with higher population densities than European countries still have worse broadband. Americans just accept crap for a high price.
Right. I live in NY. By your logic, I should have at least 100/100 Mbit to my apartment, but I don't. Why?
Because companies focus on getting broader coverage over improving service for just your city. New York isn't all of the USA.
If we lived in a tiny country like Sweden or Japan, it would be easy to have infrastructure in place for good internet speeds for all. "Unfortunately" for us, we just have too much room here in the USA.
This argument would make sense if Sweden was indeed geographically tiny and densely populated, however, it is not.
Sweden is actually far less densely populated than the US (source: Wikipedia and Nationmaster).
As for geography Sweden may be quite thin but this is not exactly useful for reducing costs for mobile infrastructure
since the signals from the mobile radio masts propagates in all directions forming a rough circle.
If you try to overlay Sweden on the continental US (just look at Google maps/earth) you would actually be able to enter
Sweden in Canada and exit it in Mexico without ever setting foot in the US.
In other words: Despite having less money per capita, fewer residents per square mile, a less suitable geographical shape and
being largely covered by forests blocking the the signals Sweden still manages to achieve better service than the continental US.
The excuse that the US has worse service because it is harder to reach all corners is and will always remain complete BS.
The service sucks because the operators lack competition and don't want to invest any more of their earnings than they absolutely
have to on infrastructure.
Damn. I copied and pasted a and old piece of text and hit reply before I could edit it.
I was supposed to correct it to be about wired rather than cell reception but the general point stands.
Most people use their internet connection mainly to browse the web where responsiveness is the key and relatively seldomly transfer large files where throughput matters.
Of course netflix will only care about the latter metric skewing rhe results and thus screwing the ISPs and users.
Latencies jumped already disgustingly when people went wireless. Even the best wireless stuff out there today cannot compete with good old wired when it comes to latency.
Wide Open West (WOW) is my provider, and a damn good one too. They weren't on the list, but should be.
Do ISP rankings really matter, given that 98% of USians have exactly *no* choice in broadband providers?
Of course Netflix want's to rank the speed of the boxes it's meal-ticket rides on.
Hell I should start an encrypted voice service to compete with skype, while legally (through corruption) force the internet backbone to carry the packets for my whole business. Netflix (and my theoretical voice service) is a plague for your idle boxen
Do ISP rankings really matter, given that 98% of USians have exactly *no* choice in broadband providers?
Do only 2% really have both DSL and cable available to them? If people are stuck on DSL, it may convince the cable companies to invest in their infrastructure. A duopoly in wired broadband is better than a monopoly, and a monopoly is better than being stuck on satellite "fraudband".
It would be nice to have either an official app or plugin for desktop Linux (Android being an example of mobile Linux), though.
So why can't Android just be run in a chroot under desktop Linux? Is it that Netflix refuses to support those Android phones that use an Atom CPU instead of an ARM CPU?
I use Verizon DSL myself, and have a pal not even 10 minutes away in the suburbs (I am in the inner urban area) on FIOS noting it.
I began to notice it around 6++ months back, when my download speed began to degrade - I even put new telephone wires & junction boxes into my home in case it was degradation of the wires themselves, along with new network cables between my router, modem, & the PC!
(I tested by using downloads that are consistent to a remote Microsoft server for the latest-greatest update to Microsoft Security Essentials, roughly a 70mb sized file, to keep things consistent on a "benchmark" of speed testing)
I went from 125k/sec., down to 110k/sec., down to 104k/sec. (and proved this to their remote techs with THEIR speedtest too, not just the one I rigged up) in that timeframe.
A pal of mine that I noted above is on VERIZON too, albeit FIOS (not DSL like myself) & HE complains of the SAME THING (& showed me his tests, same degradation but MUCH LARGER DROPS IN SPEED (% "pound-for-pound" my bandwidth vs. his, is around the same)).
I called VERIZON on it - they said I was in their "80% rule" of advertised speed for DSL... so I told them "Well, then you will get only 80% of the billing amount".
My pal did the same - I'd LOVE for them to try hassle me over it, because they're NOT going to get more than the % of speed I paid for & actually get...
Either they are "QoS"'ing us, or they have oversubscribed what bandwidth they actually have to profit (at the expense of false advertising)... unless anyone can show me otherwise? I'll stand by that hypothesis.
APK
P.S.=> I suspect, as does my pal, that they are OVER-SUBSCRIBING what bandwidth they actually HAVE, & selling it off under false-pretenses as the speeds they advertise (which are far over what you actually get), because they just don't have it to give after over-subscribing so many people to the pipes they actually own, the speed is SO "chopped up" & divided, they can't MAKE the advertised figure anymore (toss on the fact more people are using the internet for streaming video or piracy downloading HUGE ISO's & what-not)...
... apk
I find it pretty interesting that despite all their bragging about their 4G networks and coverage, Sprint and AT&T were beat out by the budget brand T-Mobile. Verizon beat T-Mobile, but not by as much as you'd think...
Maybe all that "customers using too much data" is actually "we have a shitty network infrastructure and don't want to cut into profits to improve it".
By "rural", do you mean people that live 1+km mile from their nearest neighbor?
The closest community is a cluster of 10 houses with a bar/pub?
The nearest place to buy groceries is 30 miles away?
The nearest place to buy fuel is 10+ miles away?
I don't think we're thinking the same things, because some of the people I know would have to pay for over a mile of cable to be buried from the ISP's incoming line. A few were told they'd have to pay for a node, or some sort of junction.
In 2007 you could get 100 megabits from Cablevision. If you don't have that, probably your local borough council let in Time Warner and not Cablevision.
Those states need to be connected, that doesn't just magically happen as you believe.
This is somewhat interesting but, RELEVANCY!!!
What speed is the maximum that Netflix will send? Does it matter if ATT Uverse is 1.9 and TimeWarner is 2.12 if the maximum transmission rate is 1.00?
Charter isn't really a choice, it's more like a joke, except not as a funny.
Could you elaborate on why Charter Internet is a joke? This review (second Google result for [charter internet review]) says "HSI and Phone work great" but "Charter TV SUCKS, SUCKS, SUCKS".
If your'e anywhere in the Bay Area you have far more choices than that - you apparently just cant be bothered to look.
And if this thread were about mobile service your post might actually have some sort of value.
This thread is about broadband speeds, and to a lesser extent, access. I've been to Sweden a number of times, and as for its broadband I'd compare it to a faster version of Google Wireless here in Mt View - stable, mostly reliable, but a one-size fits all deal that manages to be 'good-enough'.
I think it's more an issue of the phones people are using. None of the cell providers appear to be separated into 3g/4g, so the more people who are using older cell phones the worse that provider will appear in the measurements.
If your'e anywhere in the Bay Area you have far more choices than that - you apparently just cant be bothered to look.
Please tell me where these providers are - I've looked. They all use AT&T for the last mile, so all of the DSL offerings top out at up to 3mbit due to the distance from the central office. And that's with a bonded DSL connection. The rep at one ISP (Sonic.net - I highly recommend them), recommended that I just go with Comcast due to my distance from the Telco central office.
No U-verse in my neighborhood (or most of SF). I checked a couple fixed-wireless providers, but not only was their service expensive (one wanted $500/month for 5 mbit if i signed a 3 year contract), but due to my location (no clear line of sight to Sutro), they wouldn't guarantee service unless I paid for a site survey. Plus I'd need to get permission from my landlord to install a dish on the roof.
But since you seem to be an expert in internet in all areas in the bay area, perhaps you can recommend a cost effective solution that's not Cable or DSL. I'm sure AT&T would be happy to tell me a DS3 or Metro ethernet, but that's out of my price range.
move to a real city.