Hello geekzoners!

Here at Bigpipe we love stats, charts and other things like that.

TL;DR  NZ has good infrastructure for streaming videos!

As you might know Netflix publishes stats on average throughput speeds that different ISPs get to Netflix servers. 

How they calculate this:
The Netflix ISP Speed Index lists the average prime time bitrate for Netflix content streamed to Netflix members during a particular month. For ‘Prime Time’, we calculate the average bitrate of Netflix content in megabits per second (Mbps) streamed by Netflix members per ISP. We measure the speed via all available end user devices. For a small number of devices, we cannot calculate the exact bitrates and streaming via cellular networks is exempted from our measurements. The speed indicated in the Netflix ISP Speed Index is not a measure of the maximum throughput or the maximum capacity of an ISP. 


NZ data can be found here
http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/country/new-zealand/


This data, when taken at a national average level, is probably a pretty good representation of overall how good the infrastructure in that country is.

So whilst it's not very reasonable to compare ISPs in NZ using the data (see bottom section for explanation of why), it is quite reasonable, I think, to compare NZ with, say, Australia.

So, with that explanation of the data out of the way, how does NZ stack up vs other countries?

You can access the data here http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/global/  and download it as a handy CSV file.
I did that, and what do you know, NZ is sitting at joint 7th out of 32 countries for average throughput!  Not bad eh?
top ten chart:


No metric is perfect of course, but what's interesting is that other comparisons (like Akamai or Sandvine) often place NZ somewhere near the middle of the pack when it comes to performance, whereas using this metric, we are in the top 25% of countries.

Other notable contries rankings:
USA ranked 19th
Australia ranked 16th
UK ranked 8th (well, joint 7th with NZ)

Here is the countries in rank order as per the most recent stats (this, of course, excludes the 100 or so extra countries they very recently opened up for Netflix - not enough data there yet)

  Country Mbps
1 Luxembourg 4.21
2 Belgium 4.025
3 Denmark 3.97
4 Switzerland 3.95
5 Netherlands 3.91
6 Norway 3.81
7 New Zealand 3.695
8 United Kingdom 3.695
9 Finland 3.585
10 Germany 3.58
11 France 3.55
12 Sweden 3.545
13 Spain 3.505
14 Portugal 3.355
15 Japan 3.34
16 Australia 3.275
17 Austria 3.14
18 Uruguay 3.09
19 United States 2.92
20 Italy 2.775
21 Ireland 2.745
22 Chile 2.725
23 Canada 2.69
24 Brazil 2.51
25 Argentina 2.5
26 Panama 2.38
27 Colombia 2.325
28 Mexico 2.31
29 Ecuador 2.215
30 Jamaica 2.05
31 Peru 1.81
32 Costa Rica 1.675

Just thought this would be an interesting topic for discussion. Looking forward to seeing what you guys have to say about the interpretation of the data.


Footnote:
*Why this (probably) shouldn't be used to compare ISPs in NZ
For the USA, where different ISPs usually use different underlying infrastructure that they own and manage, it is a pretty decent way of comparing how they perform against one another.

However, for NZ, where most ISPs are using the same underlying infrastructure (owned by Chorus for the most part), the differences between the ISPs is mostly reflected in the fact that they will have different proportions of customers on high and low speed plans that generally reflect the instrastructure available in that area.

In other words, the differences between the ISPs doesn't really tell you that one ISP in NZ is 'better' or 'worse' than the other, it's just down to the underlying technology their customers have and how that mix changes over time. So at any given house, based on this data, you cannot say that one ISP will perform better than another for Netflix assuming you are not changing technology at the same time. 

For example,  Snap (now 2Degrees) was also one of the first ISPs to launch UFB and VDSL, and has experienced a lot of it's growth since then.  So it's pretty likely to have a very high proportion of customers on these higher speed plans, using quite modern modems with decent wifi, which will skew their average throughput to Netflix up a fair bit.

Spark, on the other hand, being the incumbent, has a very high proportion of the 'rural' market - meaning most of the customers who live with ADSL1 will be with Spark, and quite a lot of them will have very old modems with poor wifi that they got when they first got broadband 5+ years ago.  This will skew their average down a bit. Nothing to do with Spark as an ISP, just the nature of the customer technology mix.

Most ISPs have improved their average speed over the past few months. This likely reflects the change in their customer base as more and more people get UFB and VDSL (and also better modems) which brings the average up (as well as a one-off adujstment for putting in caching etc)
trend over time


and finally, when comparing ISPs, note that the speed difference between best and worse isn't really that much anyway (3.92Mbps for 2Degrees at rank 1 vs 3.47 for Trustpower at bottom rank - a fair bit below the next 'worst' at 3.70).
Latest NZ ranking




(strangely absent from the list is MyRepublic.  No idea why they don't qualify. (maybe not big enough yet?)