How fast is your provider?

With their newest streaming only plans, it is in Netflix’s interest to ensure that the service can actually deliver as promised. And if you’re streaming tons of content into people’s homes then you will get great insight into the actual capacity that subscribers are able to sustain to their homes.

Recently, on the Netflix tech blog, they published Netflix performance on the top USA networks. The performance of the networks group into three main clusters, an unsurprising finding when you think about how the service is delivered.

The first is the cable companies who have a nice “fat” pipe into your house. Charter leads the pack closely followed by Comcast and Time Warner. Cox, Suddenlink, Cablevision and Cable One round out the pack.

The next group down is led by the Mobile Phone Operators, Verizon and AT&T with their fiber services followed by what appears to be a pack of DSL based providers (Embarq, Windstream and Qwest).

The last group is the only one that provides a bit of a surprise with Clearwire running at about half the speed of Comcast. Not a great advert for their much vaunted 4G WiMax network but it is the only wireless service on the list so is affected by things like distance from towers, phases of the moon and sunspot activity. Ok, so phases of the moon and sunspots don’t’ really effect bandwidth (but it sounded good).

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