Netflix Ranks ISP Speeds 186
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."
Only ranks major ISPs (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Charter plain and simple sucks (Score:4, Informative)
These people lie constantly. When I signed up for Charter, I asked if I could run temporary instances of game servers so I could play my favorite games online. They said yes. That's a big lie, they block pretty much every port. I call to talk about this, I get sent to business class support, which ends up saying "We don't block anything over port 8080, so you should be able to run your games just fine."
Nope. Can't connect or host shit on my PS3, or my computer.
Then to boot, I'm paying for 100 mbit down. I can NEVER get more than 30mbit down.
Charter is a business full of false advertising and sheer incompetence. Avoid these fuckers like the plague if you can. As soon as Verizon FIOS is available here, I'm ditching Charter. Fuck those lying sons of bitches.
Re:Charter plain and simple sucks (Score:3, Informative)
Charter was great when I signed up. I even got the 100meg service and it was amazing.. For a while.
A few months ago the services started taking a dump. I went from 100mbit all the time, all day, to a laggy 300kbps in the evenings. (300kpbs down and 5 megabits up - How fucked up does your network have to be for that to be true?)
It's not on my end either. I had their techs at my place for eight hours making sure they had they cleanest signal they've ever seen.
I hear it's pretty much system wide. Their whole network is in the shitter and they don't seem to be doing much about it.
Re:lol @ your shitty speeds in the US. (Score:0, Informative)
Re:lol @ your shitty speeds in the US. (Score:3, Informative)
If we lived in a tiny country like Sweden or Japan, it would be easy to have infrastructure in place for good internet speeds for all. "Unfortunately" for us, we just have too much room here in the USA.
You can't blame it all on geography, I live in a small, densely populated city (with density exceeding many Japanese urban areas) located very close to Silicon Valley and my only options are Comcast Cable internet or "up to" 3 mbit DSL.
Re:Charter plain and simple sucks (Score:4, Informative)
I had the 100MBs charter business line into my house up until a year ago for work (sold my company so they were no longer paying for it) and went to their standard 30mbs connection. I was never hosting any servers, but was involved on a large software project that transferred several gigs of data each day doing repo pulls and pushes, etc.. What I found wasn't that I was having connection problems on my end, but it was the servers that I was connecting to which seemed to be the bottle neck. I tested this from the main office which had a 100Mbs fiber line and found much the same that the most the remote servers we were using would allow us to pull was about 5MB/s sustained. I used to stream movies/tv from hulu on my iPad while waiting for code to download/upload and sometimes while playing my XBox all at the same time. Bandwidth never seemed to be a problem.
Even now on the 30Mb/s connection I don't really notice any problems even if other people are over and using their computers/iPads/Phones and whatnot.
I think the problem with Cable in general is a lot depends on how many users are on your line. I know for a fact that I am one of two houses on this line with cable internet. And the other house on the street is currently unoccupied while being renovated. Everyone else switched to Direct TVa couple years ago and are older and don't use the internet.
Don't Know What We "Need" Until We Have It (Score:4, Informative)
I was one of the first DSL customers in Hawaii. At the time, my non-technical circle didn't see the point. "Always on? 10x faster? 2x as expensive? Whatever for?" Indeed. Based on your (I suspect) tougue-in-cheek comment, I'd note that neither distro d/ls or streaming video would be possible without it.... but we didn't know until we could *could* do it.
In Australia, they're busy debating whether the proposed National Broadband Network of fibre optics links is "worth it". What would you run over it that we can't run now?
It hasn't been invented yet.
Re:Only ranks major ISPs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only ranks major ISPs (Score:5, Informative)
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)