Netflix Releases Speed Rankings of Top American ISPs – Google Fiber Wins
Netflix has 30 million members viewing over 1 billion hours of Netflix per month, so the company has the ability to compare ISPs in terms of real world performance. Starting this month, Netflix will publish monthly rankings of major ISPs based upon their actual performance across all Netflix streams. The results from the first month show Google Fiber is the fastest ISP in America with Verizon (FiOS) in second place and a tie between Comcast and Charter for third place. Google Fiber averaged 2.55 Mbps for Netflix streams in November 2012 in order to get the top spot. Google’s new Fiber service is only available in the Kansas City area, but it appears to be the king of video streaming despite not being available to the masses. ATT mobile was on the bottom of the list with just 0.48 Mbps.
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.
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