Netflix Compares ISP Streaming Performance 209
boustrophedon writes "The Netflix blog compared streaming performance among 20 top ISPs for the past three months. A Netflix HD stream can provide up to 4800 kbps, but the fastest American ISP, Charter, could sustain only 2667 kbps on average. Most Canadian ISPs beat that, with champ Rogers providing an average of 3020 kbps. Clearwire, Frontier, and CenturyTel were in the doghouse with under 1600 kbps."
Re:Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got Verizon FiOS, and though I know it's not that common, but I can get steady 3.7 MB/s streams.
I'm not going to suggest that you are incorrect, but I am going to suggest that your single piece anecdotal evidence is not nearly enough to discredit the report Netflix put together.
Reverse the tables (Score:5, Insightful)
Very nice. Rather impressive to pre-empt the ISP's.
"well, your competitor is able to provide better speeds to more customers, why are you whining? Oh? AND You charge more for lower service? Interesting. Well, lets let your customers decide for themselves with more facts who they want"
It'd make sense at this point for an ISP with a bit of sense to make a nice deal with Netflix to improve things here, then everyone wins.
Re:Wow Verizon is around 2k? (Score:5, Insightful)
.
Great to live in the US... (Score:3, Insightful)
Fantastic. The worst ISP in Canada is still faster than the best ISP in the US.
Also, while interesting, this is basically useless to the average US consumer. It's not like you get a chance to choose between those 16 US ISPs. In the US, you're lucky if you get to choose between 2 of them.
Different Services need to be split (Score:5, Insightful)
The different connections need to be split.
For example, Verizon needs to have:
Verizon DSL 768kbps - 1Mbps
Verizon DSL 1.5Mbps - 3Mbps
Verizon DSL 4Mbps - 7Mbps
Verizon DSL 10Mbps - 15Mbps
Verizon FIOS 15Mbps
Verizon FIOS 25Mbps
Verizon FIOS 50Mbps
Obviously a low end DSL connection is not going to be the same as those who can order the 10-15Mbps DSL connection. And it is likely that the DSL 10-15Mbps connection is going to be different from the FIOS 15Mbps.
To group all of those connections into one Verizon line is completely misleading. And if they didn't take measurements from all of those connections, then then that makes the results even more suspect as the graph doesn't specify what type of connection they chose to test with.
These numbers are averages, so they're bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
please use real speeds (Score:5, Insightful)
only problem is, running full tilt I can go through my monthly bandwidth cap in eleven and a half hours.
We badly need a "truth in advertising" law that would make it illegal to label a "100Mbps connection" with a 5GB monthly cap as anything above the 16331bps it really is (yes, less than 16kbps, this is not an error). Providing a bigger burst is ok but only if that's clearly marked as such.
Toss in something about the scam that lets ISPs call 100Mbps down/128kbps up by the bigger number. If you want to use just one number, you'd need to print the lower one. Anything else is deceiving the customer.