About twice a day at our house you can hear someone shout – who’s on Netflix? The kids especially don’t really know if the problem is Netflix, our network, or their bandwidth hog sister. Netflix is about to help answer that question…
Starting today, we’ll publish monthly rankings of major ISPs based upon their actual performance across all Netflix streams.
Google Fiber is now the most consistently fast ISP in America, according to actual user experience on Netflix streams in November.
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.
The average performance is well below the peak performance due to a variety of factors including home Wi-Fi, a variety of devices, and a variety of encodes. The relative ranking, however, should be an accurate indicator of relative bandwidth typically experienced across all users, homes, and applications.
They show rankings for 21 providers. The rank as they mention above seems to be: fiber, cable, DSL, mobile.
Clearly they have their reasons for showing the ranking – they’d like folks to think the issue of hiccups in Netflix stream is on the ISP end, not an issue with Netflix. Aside from that it doesn’t seem like they’d have any reason to show preference to one network over the other.
TDG predicts that more content providers will follow suit…
Akamai, one of the biggest CDNs in the world, is already providing a lot of data about Internet performance in the quarterly State of the Internet report. In 2013, I expect to see much more information from a variety of sources on the state of video streaming on the Internet. This will give us all a much better picture of how well the web is doing in the delivery of video services and provide insight into how it might handle the ongoing transition of video to IP in the future.
It would be great to see public rankings from content providers spur network improvements by lower ranking providers. However, it occurs to be that this might also start up some net neutrality conversations as well. Once this information gets out it sets the stage for low ranking providers to want to find ways to improve that ranking that are cheaper than building up their entire network.