Netflix ISP Speed Index | Hacker News Reader

Netflix ISP Speed Index

ispspeedindex.netflix.com

100 pointsmarklabedz60 comments

Does anyone have such an index for ISP's in respect to Youtube.com?

Idk whether its a routing issue or a bandwidth cap issue but with ATT Uverse youtube is constantly buffer with the video quality set to 720p. Regular speed tests show reliable 12Mb/3Mb bandwidth which should be well enough to stream a 720p video.

I can almost never watch a Youtube video in the evening, even if all other bandwidth tests put me in the tens of megabits. Thought I was the only one.

I stumbled on this page last week. Maybe it can help you.

https://www.youtube.com/my_speed

Perhaps this same issue is happening to you: http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-yo...

U-Verse subscriber here. I have 25Mbps down and I'm glad someone else is noticing this. I first noticed it early of Summer 2012 that 1080p videos were (literally) unplayable; as in no matter how long you waited the video would never start. 720p videos will buffer every 15-30 seconds.

This happens no matter what other bandwidth is being used by other applications or devices. I've actually shut down everything in my house and used the desktop on cat5 to see if it was wireless issues or anything, but the entire rest of the web is snappy and responsive except for HD YouTube.

Thanks AT&T-- the two hundred and forty goddamned dollars a month I'm paying you should defray the cost of the configuration of your service to flirt with the very line of net neutrality.

Dear god please Google Fiber come to Madison.

I see the same thing on Comcast sometimes, I think it's probably just something wrong with Youtube's routing.

I gave up on U-Verse, it would go down so often. Switched to comcast and not had any problems with netflix or youtube.

I have the same issue, but haven't had the time to fully investigate it yet. Other services have excellent download speed, typically about 3 megabytes per second download of say movies purchased through iTunes. But for some reason 1080p YouTube videos will never load.

The only thing that could be causing this is if:

1) YouTube's servers can't push the 1080p video out fast enough. (Very doubtful)

2) U Verse hasn't invested in a capable enough link to YouTube's servers. (Possible, but even a 240p video loads faster than a 1080p video. If it was purely a connection issue then 240p and 1080p videos should load at the same slow speed.)

3) They are purposefully throttling HD YouTube videos to ensure that more bandwidth is available for other things. (I'd say this is most likely.)

Either way some sort of unprofessional and/or shady thing is happening with U Verse and HD YouTube videos.

I have 75Mbps down with a fiber optic provider in my area and Youtube is constantly buffering at any HD resolution.

I'm pretty sure it's Youtube and not our ISPs.

I had a similar problem when living in a college dorm; Youtube was suspiciously slower than the rest of the internet.

A workaround is to use a ipv6 tunnel. Youtube was literally 5 times faster when my tunnel from SixXs was active.

Back when I was with AT&T, proxying my traffic (over SSH, even) killed all buffer issues I had with Youtube. It's either bad routing or deliberate traffic shaping, and given my experience with AT&T I'm leaning towards the latter.

youtube appears to be doing QOS throttling on some of their named fe's you need to pick one that isn't in your usual path if you're having issues.

edit: It appears that the 173.194.55.0/24 and the 206.111.0.0/16 range belongs to Google. Someone revealed that YouTube video requests were utilizing intentional bandwidth throttling that is actually built into their (YouTube) system. Once these ranges are blocked, YouTube's player logic will fall back to Google's datacenters and stream at beautiful speeds.

Wow, that worked incredibly well; thanks for the tip! 1080p videos load extremely quickly now.

How did you block those ranges?

If you're on a Mac, it's:

sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 173.194.55.0/24 in

sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 206.111.0.0/16 in

Thanks!

I am in Europe on a 50/5 Mbit line and youtube is just slow and always buffers if i try to watch something HD in the evening. Speedtests give me 40-50Mbit constantly so it has to be a Youtube issue... very annoying :/

Netflix (I know some of you are here),

Would you consider including sonic.net. I realize they are local/regional to the greater Bay area, but as one of the first ISP's to offer (trial) gigabit speed, and at a reasonable price, I think they deserve a nod.

In fact, as I wrote the above, I expanded on this thought. I'd like to see the Chattanooga high speed service mentioned, and perhaps some others. This could be a good message that higher performance Internet -- other than just Google; not that I'm knocking Google on this -- is possible and is offered by some more progressive providers.

And that it's this real competition that will drag the rest of us forward into a better network (and so, Netflix) experience.

Thanks for your consideration

Seconded. Moreover, in Chattanooga, the cheapest/slowest option EPB provides is 50Mb, which is quite a bit more than the average connection speed listed for Google Fiber. I'm on that plan and the rate is usually closer to the 60Mb range; fast enough to necessitate plugging in an ethernet cable if I want to max out my connection.

The cheapest/slowest option from Google Fiber is also much faster than the average connection speed listed for Google Fiber.

The listed speeds are impacted by all sorts of factors (not the least of which is that most of Netflix's content likely caps out at somewhere less than 3 Mbps, so it will be tough for any ISP to have an average speed much higher than that).

Why is that Netflix is SO much faster for me than YouTube. I am on a shitty ~5Mbps DSL connection so on YouTube I have to watch 240p (360p on a good day) video to get it to load in anywhere close to real time. On Netflix, my video goes to what looks like 480p-720p quality within the first minute of my watching and the initial 240p-360p quality video loads nearly instantly. Is it just that Netflix has a smaller library and has more caching available for popular content, or are they doing something totally different with video delivery?

The Internet is a really complicated place. There could be any number of reasons Netflix is faster for you than YouTube: your ISP might have better peering with Netflix than Google, or it might have a wider transit pipe to Netflix's preferred transit provider(s) than Google's. Netflix content could indeed be cached closer to your location than YouTube content. With more details I could find out exactly what's happening when you visit YouTube, but I wouldn't be able to share the explanation, and it would probably just be an exercise in frustration for you.

What I can say is that this is definitely something you should let your ISP know about. Tell your ISP that you're unsatisfied with YouTube performance: while some will just brush off the complaint, conscientious ISPs are constantly bringing issues like these to our attention and we have entire teams devoted to making sure all users have a good YouTube experience.

You are right. Of course a "wider transit pipe to Netflix than to Google" also means "more available bandwidth towards Netflix than towards Google".

There is probably more users using google than netflix at the moment, and thus is more probably that that bandwidth gets saturated.

"Why is that Netflix is SO much faster for me than YouTube"

https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines ?

Your DNS may play havoc if you aren't using your ISP's DNS. Instead of getting a short-route optimized for your ISP, you could be getting bounced who-knows-where. I use OpenDNS, but set my home theater up to bypass my local DNS and go straight to my ISP's DNS and saw a significant improvement.

I understand why companies use DNS to facilitate routing, but I wish they didn't.

I've never messed with any DNS settings at all. Does this mean I'm using my ISPs DNS? And what are the benefits of something like OpenDNS?

You are almost certainly using your ISP's DNS.

I use OpenDNS for the filtering. I've got four kids and dozens of devices scattered through the house. OpenDNS keeps most of the crud that I'd rather they not see out of my network and it requires zero administration when a friend comes over or a new device shows up.

The other benefit of using a provider like OpenDNS is a (supposed) reduction in the time it takes to do a DNS lookup. Given how many DNS lookups I do in a day, this could add up to real time (but I've never actually tested whether it is faster or not).

What I want to know is, why the hell is Netflix faster than Xfinity's video service through my Comcast connection? I get minutes of buffering every time I use Xfinity. It's ridiculous.

I find it interesting how google fiber not only raised America's bar by ~25% but has been steadily destroying their own record month after month. http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/results/usa/graph

I hope that chart makes some ISPs fearful enough to start innovating.

Google Fiber claims it's supposed to be "100 times faster than today's broadband." As evidenced by this chart, the experience via Netflix is nothing like 100x. Is this just because NFLX's bandwidth requirements for streaming video are far short of GF's bandwidth availability?

Yes. Netflix only uses up to 5 Mbps so the benefit of gigabit is mostly wasted.

Google Fiber is still being rolled out. Also, the "free" tier will intentionally deliver average broadband speeds with a one time fee of $300 or $25/mo for 12 months. So, Netflix would have to selectively choose only those Google Fiber customers that choose the higher tiers.

Making Netflix work better is about the last thing most US ISPs want. Maybe we'll have to wait for the Facebook speed index.

The FCC's tests which showed some ISPs only delivering 75% of what they advertised did encourage those ISPs to improve, though.

I'm sure that a large part of that was also "legislators calling ISPs out on slow speeds" and "public outcry" (manufactured or otherwise).

Seems oddly low. I know the US is notorious for low speeds, but 3.35 Mbps for Google fiber? Does their measurement actually measure what I intuitively think measures?

I've used two different ISPs in recent years and both sustained 10+ Mbps over long periods of time with their mid range tiers, and had basic tiers offering 3 - 5 Mbps which I believe performed as rated.

While I know that most of the country is likely on slow Internet, I have a really hard time seeing how the numbers end up lower than ~5 Mbps avg overall unless the whole situation is way worse than I ever suspected and that large portions of the sample were either mobile users or rural.

netflix content caps out at ~6mbps for HD, and for streams or equipment that doesn't support HD (not uncommon) that number is ~1.5mbps

I was wondering this as well. Why would ISPs stream less than Netflix's max bitrate? Is it because of congestion? Throttling?

I don't know about other ISPs, but Comcast offers several different rates for their cable Internet. But the Netflix chart only shows one line. So what is this really reporting? If Comcast is faster than competitor Foo, is that just because a higher percentage of Comcast's subscribers are on a better plan?

I agree. Frontier has a fiber and a DSL offering. Seeing both mixed together (I can just guess that that is what is oing on) is pretty useless.

That's possible, although realistically Netflix is less than 5 Mbps so even a slow plan should be enough.

The only study I've seen which takes different plans into account is the FCC one.

Am I the only one who think this is a cheap shot from Netflix? They are putting preassure on the ISP's to host Netflix servers for free, and when some of them dont want to do that Netflix tries to give them bad reputation by displaying this statistics (where the ones that dont host netflix servers will get a low score). If Netflix was concerned about ther customers video quality they would PAY the ISP's to host their servers like everybody else. Now they are just trying to push their costs to the ISP's and make it hard for competitors to deliver the same quality for the same cost, unless they also manage to "force" the ISP's to host their servers for free...

You are not.

Genius work from Netflix. They have the data, why not display it? Removes blame from them for poor video performance. We all don't think we get what we pay for on broadband, now there is industry support for that. These rankings will shame companies into providing better access. Minimally, they will prioritize Netflix traffic.

Good for the community, giving users some tools to vote with their dollars. Good for Netflix either way.

I keep seeing stories about how the broadband subscribers in the U.S. pay more for less service. We might pay more, but our service seems to fall close to the average for the companies shown here.

Does anyone have numbers for Korea (South), Japan, etc?

This is the average speed for the Netflix streams, not the average speed of the internet connections. So if their highest bitrate stream is 5 Mbps for example, that is the maximum you could see on those graphs.

These ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISPs network. The average is well below the peak performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and movies we carry as well as home Wi-Fi and the variety of devices our members use. Those factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs, so these relative rankings are a good indicator of the consistent performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.

Akamai's State of the Internet report shows internet speeds worldwide: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/

Average connection speed

* USA - 7,195 kbps * South Korea - 14,626 kbps * Japan - 10,513 kbps

Average peak connection speed

* USA - 29,626 kbps * South Korea - 48,750 kbps * Japan - 42,172 kbps

(I believe this is is per IP address and excludes Mobile traffic)

It would be nice if I could browse the long-tail. I'd love to see how Sonic.net and MonkeyBrains compare to AT&T UVerse, for instance.

1. It's curious that Canada isn't included. Netflix does streaming in Canada.

2. The UI on graph view Could be better if there was a "disable all"/"enable all" feature. Parts of the graph were crowded enough that I had to click on all of the ISPs (in the US data) to disable them, and do comparisons with a smaller subset of ISPs.

The interesting thing that I'm taking from this is that The United States is not nearly as far behind other countries (average bandwidth wise) as some would have you believe.

In fact, our average bandwidth seemed to be about exactly the same as the other counties.

Average bandwidth appears to be the same among people who use Netflix but this set of people is not necessarily a good representative sample of all the people in the United States. Many areas have such terrible internet service that Netflix doesn't buffer well enough to be worth paying for. These connections clearly wouldn't be on Netflix's chart and therefore not contributing to the statistics.

I'm a little worried about this. What's going to stop, e.g., a low-ranked provider from prioritizing Netflix packets above other packets? This seems like an unintentional network-neutrality backdoor of sorts.

Netflix actually wants low ranked service provider to agree to host edge caches for netflix's multi-service CDN, which saves them power and transit and lets them charge others to get on there.

I'm with virginmedia and apparently they have infastructure that allows me to stream from netflix at 1080p but I'm not allowed to make use of it because I'm not running Windows 8. wtf?

Pretty sure that's a Netflix call; their Silverlight browser plugin doesn't have all the features of their Windows 8 app.

I zoomed out to 67%. Large fonts are really great for texts, but not for lists where you want to get an overview.

Edit: And Google Fiber an average speed of only 3mbps? Something seems wrong here.

That's the average for USA. I didn't get that straight away either and wondered why Google fiber had a lowest speed of 1.25Mbps* and what CLEARWIRE was.

That's pretty damning for Virgin Media, given they are cable so aren't limited by weak ADSL connections, and their "basic" packages are now supposedly 30Mbit/s.

Not convinced this is Virgin's fault, but perhaps a limit imposed by Netflix. Compare the Google Fiber results for the US.

My 60Mb/s Virgin service can demonstrably deliver the full 60Mb/s — but I usually have to start at least 4 - 5 downloads to actually saturate it.

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/canada

404.

Canada's internet speeds are hilariously bad. That's probably why they're not on the list.

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