
Netflix ISP Speed Index - marklabedz
http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/
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jug6ernaut
Does anyone have such an index for ISP's in respect to Youtube.com?

Idk whether its a routing issue or a bandwidth cap issue but with ATT Uverse
youtube is constantly buffer with the video quality set to 720p. Regular speed
tests show reliable 12Mb/3Mb bandwidth which should be well enough to stream a
720p video.

~~~
whazzmaster
U-Verse subscriber here. I have 25Mbps down and I'm glad someone else is
noticing this. I first noticed it early of Summer 2012 that 1080p videos were
(literally) unplayable; as in no matter how long you waited the video would
never start. 720p videos will buffer every 15-30 seconds.

This happens no matter what other bandwidth is being used by other
applications or devices. I've actually shut down everything in my house and
used the desktop on cat5 to see if it was wireless issues or anything, but the
entire rest of the web is snappy and responsive except for HD YouTube.

Thanks AT&T-- the two hundred and forty goddamned dollars a month I'm paying
you should defray the cost of the configuration of your service to flirt with
the very line of net neutrality.

Dear god please Google Fiber come to Madison.

~~~
NathanKP
I have the same issue, but haven't had the time to fully investigate it yet.
Other services have excellent download speed, typically about 3 megabytes per
second download of say movies purchased through iTunes. But for some reason
1080p YouTube videos will never load.

The only thing that could be causing this is if:

1) YouTube's servers can't push the 1080p video out fast enough. (Very
doubtful)

2) U Verse hasn't invested in a capable enough link to YouTube's servers.
(Possible, but even a 240p video loads faster than a 1080p video. If it was
purely a connection issue then 240p and 1080p videos should load at the same
slow speed.)

3) They are purposefully throttling HD YouTube videos to ensure that more
bandwidth is available for other things. (I'd say this is most likely.)

Either way some sort of unprofessional and/or shady thing is happening with U
Verse and HD YouTube videos.

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pasbesoin
Netflix (I know some of you are here),

Would you consider including sonic.net. I realize they are local/regional to
the greater Bay area, but as one of the first ISP's to offer (trial) gigabit
speed, and at a reasonable price, I think they deserve a nod.

In fact, as I wrote the above, I expanded on this thought. I'd like to see the
Chattanooga high speed service mentioned, and perhaps some others. This could
be a good message that higher performance Internet -- other than just Google;
not that I'm knocking Google on this -- _is_ possible and _is_ offered by some
more progressive providers.

And that it's this _real_ competition that will drag the rest of us forward
into a better network (and so, Netflix) experience.

Thanks for your consideration

~~~
crymer11
Seconded. Moreover, in Chattanooga, the cheapest/slowest option EPB provides
is 50Mb, which is quite a bit more than the average connection speed listed
for Google Fiber. I'm on that plan and the rate is usually closer to the 60Mb
range; fast enough to necessitate plugging in an ethernet cable if I want to
max out my connection.

~~~
JshWright
The cheapest/slowest option from Google Fiber is also much faster than the
average connection speed listed for Google Fiber.

The listed speeds are impacted by all sorts of factors (not the least of which
is that most of Netflix's content likely caps out at somewhere less than 3
Mbps, so it will be tough for any ISP to have an average speed much higher
than that).

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habosa
Why is that Netflix is SO much faster for me than YouTube. I am on a shitty
~5Mbps DSL connection so on YouTube I have to watch 240p (360p on a good day)
video to get it to load in anywhere close to real time. On Netflix, my video
goes to what looks like 480p-720p quality within the first minute of my
watching and the initial 240p-360p quality video loads nearly instantly. Is it
just that Netflix has a smaller library and has more caching available for
popular content, or are they doing something totally different with video
delivery?

~~~
jemfinch
The Internet is a _really_ complicated place. There could be any number of
reasons Netflix is faster for you than YouTube: your ISP might have better
peering with Netflix than Google, or it might have a wider transit pipe to
Netflix's preferred transit provider(s) than Google's. Netflix content could
indeed be cached closer to your location than YouTube content. With more
details I could find out exactly what's happening when you visit YouTube, but
I wouldn't be able to share the explanation, and it would probably just be an
exercise in frustration for you.

What I can say is that this is definitely something you should let your ISP
know about. Tell your ISP that you're unsatisfied with YouTube performance:
while some will just brush off the complaint, conscientious ISPs are
constantly bringing issues like these to our attention and we have entire
teams devoted to making sure all users have a good YouTube experience.

~~~
ithkuil
You are right. Of course a "wider transit pipe to Netflix than to Google" also
means "more available bandwidth towards Netflix than towards Google".

There is probably more users using google than netflix at the moment, and thus
is more probably that that bandwidth gets saturated.

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crisnoble
I find it interesting how google fiber not only raised America's bar by ~25%
but has been steadily destroying their own record month after month.
<http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/results/usa/graph>

I hope that chart makes some ISPs fearful enough to start innovating.

~~~
te
Google Fiber claims it's supposed to be "100 times faster than today's
broadband." As evidenced by this chart, the experience via Netflix is nothing
like 100x. Is this just because NFLX's bandwidth requirements for streaming
video are far short of GF's bandwidth availability?

~~~
wmf
Yes. Netflix only uses up to 5 Mbps so the benefit of gigabit is mostly
wasted.

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armored_mammal
Seems oddly low. I know the US is notorious for low speeds, but 3.35 Mbps for
Google fiber? Does their measurement actually measure what I intuitively think
measures?

I've used two different ISPs in recent years and both sustained 10+ Mbps over
long periods of time with their mid range tiers, and had basic tiers offering
3 - 5 Mbps which I believe performed as rated.

While I know that most of the country is likely on slow Internet, I have a
really hard time seeing how the numbers end up lower than ~5 Mbps avg overall
unless the whole situation is way worse than I ever suspected and that large
portions of the sample were either mobile users or rural.

~~~
trotsky
netflix content caps out at ~6mbps for HD, and for streams or equipment that
doesn't support HD (not uncommon) that number is ~1.5mbps

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pjungwir
I don't know about other ISPs, but Comcast offers several different rates for
their cable Internet. But the Netflix chart only shows one line. So what is
this really reporting? If Comcast is faster than competitor Foo, is that just
because a higher percentage of Comcast's subscribers are on a better plan?

~~~
wmf
That's possible, although realistically Netflix is less than 5 Mbps so even a
slow plan should be enough.

The only study I've seen which takes different plans into account is the FCC
one.

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polack
Am I the only one who think this is a cheap shot from Netflix? They are
putting preassure on the ISP's to host Netflix servers for free, and when some
of them dont want to do that Netflix tries to give them bad reputation by
displaying this statistics (where the ones that dont host netflix servers will
get a low score). If Netflix was concerned about ther customers video quality
they would PAY the ISP's to host their servers like everybody else. Now they
are just trying to push their costs to the ISP's and make it hard for
competitors to deliver the same quality for the same cost, unless they also
manage to "force" the ISP's to host their servers for free...

~~~
lkarsten
You are not.

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brokentone
Genius work from Netflix. They have the data, why not display it? Removes
blame from them for poor video performance. We all don't think we get what we
pay for on broadband, now there is industry support for that. These rankings
will shame companies into providing better access. Minimally, they will
prioritize Netflix traffic.

Good for the community, giving users some tools to vote with their dollars.
Good for Netflix either way.

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smoyer
I keep seeing stories about how the broadband subscribers in the U.S. pay more
for less service. We might pay more, but our service seems to fall close to
the average for the companies shown here.

Does anyone have numbers for Korea (South), Japan, etc?

~~~
cataflam
This is the average speed for the Netflix streams, not the average speed of
the internet connections. So if their highest bitrate stream is 5 Mbps for
example, that is the maximum you could see on those graphs.

 _These ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each
ISPs network. The average is well below the peak performance due to many
factors including the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and
movies we carry as well as home Wi-Fi and the variety of devices our members
use. Those factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs, so these relative
rankings are a good indicator of the consistent performance typically
experienced across all users on an ISP network._

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bsimpson
It would be nice if I could browse the long-tail. I'd love to see how
Sonic.net and MonkeyBrains compare to AT&T UVerse, for instance.

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pyre
1\. It's curious that Canada isn't included. Netflix does streaming in Canada.

2\. The UI on graph view Could be better if there was a "disable all"/"enable
all" feature. Parts of the graph were crowded enough that I had to click on
all of the ISPs (in the US data) to disable them, and do comparisons with a
smaller subset of ISPs.

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blhack
The interesting thing that I'm taking from this is that The United States is
not nearly as far behind other countries (average bandwidth wise) as some
would have you believe.

In fact, our average bandwidth seemed to be about exactly the same as the
other counties.

~~~
NathanKP
Average bandwidth appears to be the same among people who use Netflix but this
set of people is not necessarily a good representative sample of all the
people in the United States. Many areas have such terrible internet service
that Netflix doesn't buffer well enough to be worth paying for. These
connections clearly wouldn't be on Netflix's chart and therefore not
contributing to the statistics.

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jxf
I'm a little worried about this. What's going to stop, e.g., a low-ranked
provider from prioritizing Netflix packets above other packets? This seems
like an unintentional network-neutrality backdoor of sorts.

~~~
trotsky
Netflix actually wants low ranked service provider to agree to host edge
caches for netflix's multi-service CDN, which saves them power and transit and
lets them charge others to get on there.

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jiggy2011
I'm with virginmedia and apparently they have infastructure that allows me to
stream from netflix at 1080p but I'm not allowed to make use of it because I'm
not running Windows 8. wtf?

~~~
natem345
Pretty sure that's a Netflix call; their Silverlight browser plugin doesn't
have all the features of their Windows 8 app.

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lucb1e
I zoomed out to 67%. Large fonts are really great for texts, but not for lists
where you want to get an overview.

Edit: And Google Fiber an average speed of only 3mbps? Something seems wrong
here.

~~~
Flenser
That's the average for USA. I didn't get that straight away either and
wondered why Google fiber had a lowest speed of 1.25Mbps* and what CLEARWIRE
was.

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eterm
That's pretty damning for Virgin Media, given they are cable so aren't limited
by weak ADSL connections, and their "basic" packages are now supposedly
30Mbit/s.

~~~
gmac
Not convinced this is Virgin's fault, but perhaps a limit imposed by Netflix.
Compare the Google Fiber results for the US.

My 60Mb/s Virgin service can demonstrably deliver the full 60Mb/s — but I
usually have to start at least 4 - 5 downloads to actually saturate it.

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rocky1138
<http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/canada>

404.

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rcconf
Canada's internet speeds are hilariously bad. That's probably why they're not
on the list.

