In its latest monthly update for Ireland, the Netflix ISP Speed Index has shown some good news for customers of Virgin Media, which has risen to be the provider with the top average speed for Netflix shows in the country.
Given the amount of bandwidth Netflix takes up – not just on a household level, but a national level – the streaming services’ ISP Speed Index, released on a monthly basis, has become something of an unofficial guide to the speed of broadband services as a whole.
Currently ranking broadband in 20 countries following its almost-global expansion to 130 countries back in January, the company quickly clamped down upon services offering virtual private networks (VPNs) allowing people in one country to watch the content of another.
Huge improvement from Virgin Media
Despite the resulting grumblings from those who had gotten used to watching American content in particular, Netflix continues to draw eyeballs from Irish users and, based off the speed index, its best to watch it using Virgin Media broadband.
With a current average speed of 3.37Mbps, this marks a considerable improvement for the ISP, which was being criticised considerably online by some users as, following its re-branding from UPC, it ranked sixth on a chart of the seven ISPs with an average speed of 2.46Mbps.
The next two ISPs listed on the index, Magnet and Eir, have fallen one place each. Magnet currently boasts a speed of 3.16Mbps, a drop from the 3.22Mbps it was at last month. Eir was found to have an average speed of 2.96Mbps, down from 3.02Mbps last month.
A similar slowing of average speed has been seen on BT Ireland, Vodafone and Digiweb, with Imagine actually increasing by 0.05Mbps to 1.85Mbps.
Netflix image via ibreakstock/Shutterstock
