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."

Comments

Only ranks major ISPs

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:Only ranks major ISPs

[crow]

I'm surprised that Google Fiber is large enough to get ranked. I would have guessed that there were other regional ISPs with more customers that weren't listed. Perhaps they're listed simply to encourage the others below them to pick up their speed.

Re:Only ranks major ISPs

[Rockoon]

They probably only wanted to show ISP's that the majority of Americans have access to.

That is surely why Google Fiber and FiOS are in there.

Re:Only ranks major ISPs

[Arker]

If they provided a way to narrow it down and see only the ones in your area, it would be very useful. Big ISPs are killing the internet and any sort of consumer guide that presents their information without that of smaller competitors is ultimately a disservice. That said, this information is very useful and interesting, and I would encourage them to continue posting it - just please make it more inclusive. My provider is a small customer-owned co-op and the service is extremely competitive - it would be helpful for that information to be available alongside ratings for the industry giants.

Re:Only ranks major ISPs

[korgitser]

My guess is that they just want to ack some pressure on the big ISPs who all want Netflix to cough up for outbound traffic.

Re:Only ranks major ISPs

[Black LED]

You might be interested in Net Index. It's run by the guys who run Speedtest.net. You can look at various ISP rankings by regions.

Re:Only ranks major ISPs

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem with comcasts service is that the netops side is not one unified force. the company is basically a big conglomeration of local markets all marketed under the same brand. how things are done in one market can be radically different than the way things are done in another market. the backbone and the connections to it are wonderfully run, but the closer you get to the edge of the network, the levels of quality start to vary based on how the local markets operate. they have a great deal of autonomy and as long as they make their numbers, they don't get bothered.

(posting AC as im currently a comcast netops monkey, and the internet never forgets)

Re:Only ranks major ISPs

[Anonymous Coward]

It does get pretty annoying actually to have that much speed at times sometimes I open a streaming video somewhere and download the whole thing before I realize it isn't the video I was looking for where as with a slower connection maybe only 1/10th of the video would be loaded before I can click the next/back button.

Oh you poor baby! That reminds me. I sure hate when I am standing on the deck of my yacht and I light a Cuban cigar with a $100 bill only to remember that I'd rather have my butler bring me more martinis to drink before smoking. I mean doesn't that just plain suck? Other people think THEY got it rough, well buddy they should try that sometime!

Averages with how much deviation?

[redelm]

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.

Re:Averages with how much deviation?

[ArsonSmith]

The reason this is all released is a way for Netflix to fight the chance that their service gets throttled. It's a free market solution to anti-netneutrality legislation. I like it.

As of consumers can do anything

[guspasho]

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?

Re:Charter plain and simple sucks

[mysidia]

and found much the same that the most the remote servers we were using would allow us to pull was about 5MB/s sustained.

Did you rule out the possibility that it was just the end-to-end latency, because the server was far away?

Remember, with the TCP protocol, as end-to-end latency or distance increases: the maximum possible throughput decreases, and the minimum TCP buffer/window size required to achieve the maximum possible speed increases.

E.g. at 100ms round-trip latency, you have to have a TCP buffer size in excess of 256 Kilobytes, to get a throughput of 20 Megabits/Second; which requires special tuning at both ends of the connection.

If your TCP buffers are stuck at 64K; the best possible transfer speed at that latency will be 5 Megabits; even if you have 1 Gigabit of throughput to the server, and the server has 1 Gigabit of throughput to you end-to-end.

Re:lol @ your shitty speeds in the US.

[thetoadwarrior]

Bullshit. The states with higher population densities than European countries still have worse broadband. Americans just accept crap for a high price.

Re:This is has always been a lie

[thetoadwarrior]

All of Europe isn't a city and we manage to get broadband to rural people. I suspect NJ is more than comparable.