You're on Centurtlink Fiber I see. I had a very similar experience with them. I switched back to biz class Comcast, which was far superior/faster in almost every area, even though ostensibly slower.
That's pretty dramatic. I wonder if they throttle, won't increase peering bandwidth and won't allow them to deploy an OCA within their networks like Verizon is/did? Could be that the connection is simply tapped out and they're trying to play hardball with Netflix. It is hosted on exactly the same infrastructure and served over the same network links after all.
This is a bit of an unfair test, as it is not in Netflix's best interest to provision enough CDN capacity for any user to hit 1Gbps, especially at peak times. Netflix wants to buy/provision just enough capacity so that users don't complain. Depending on the distribution of the users in the area, this could 5Mbps per user, or 15Mbps per user for a large amount of 4K streamers.
Netflix pushes their CDN nodes to the limit, 60-70Gbps per box for video. Speedtests don't make them money, so why provision capacity for it?
If they aren't going to act like a speed test server, they shouldn't advertise it. Not that netflix is the only potential weak link between the person and fast.com.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to ever hit 1Gbps (or whatever speed), I'm simply saying it is not in Netflix's best interests to make sure this is possible 24/7 365.
I have 1Gbps CondoInternet/WaveG at home, right now at 11PM PST I get ~400Mbps from Fast.com and 800Mbps+ from DSLReports and the Comcast/Xfinity speedtest.
