From this month onwards Netflix will publish monthly rankings of ISPs in the UK and Ireland based on their “actual performance” and already the survey reveals that services across the islands are well below peak performance.
In the UK Virgin led the field with 2.24Mbps average speeds for Netflix streams followed by O2, BT, BSkyB, TalkTalk and Everything Everywhere (EE). For mobile, Vodafone was the lead provider in the UK with a consistent rate of 0.50Mbps, followed by O2, EE and 3.
In terms of Ireland the league table was led by UPC with an average speed of 2.2Mbps for Netflix streams in November, followed by Magnet, Imagine, Eircom, Digiweb and Vodafone.
In terms of performance over mobile broadband Vodafone led the list of 0.51Mbps for Netflix streams in November.
The online video service has 30m members worldwide viewing over 1bn hours of Netflix and so claims to have reliable data for consumers to compare ISPs in terms of real world performance.
“The average performance is well below the peak performance due to a variety of factors including home Wi-Fi, a wide variety of devices with different capabilities, and a variety of encodes that Netflix uses for streaming TV shows and movies,” Greg Peter, president of product development at Netflix.
“The relative ranking, however, is an accurate indicator of the quality and consistency of internet access typically experienced across all users, homes, and applications,” Peter added.
Broadband speed image via Shutterstock
