While the spread of customer connection types will impact an ISPs rank, you wouldn't expect the types of customer to change much, month to month. This makes the speed change trends interesting. Spark had a big jump up. Given their large customer base, that would indicate a significant upgrade.
Any comment on that 10% drop @bigpipe, given the norm was small increases in performance? My theory is that this issue, was the cause, and that next month you'll be back to 3.45Mb/s or better.
they apparently have average speeds miles ahead of everyone else according to their ad
I'd say they don't have enough subscribers to get them out of margin of error zone... Possible a large number of MR users are also using VPNs/DNS proxys to access the US catalogue.
The way DNS proxies work I would assume that you still would be counted as a NZ ISP customer as Netflix are counting the content delivered from their CDNs. If you have followed how the content works with DNS unblockers you most often get served from a local CDN even though you got the token to that content from a US ip.
Otherwise when you accessed UK content you would never see it in HD as streaming from the other side of the world is rather jittery.
Logging DNS traffic and following where the IPs you get directed to is very interesting to know how it all works.
Talkiet: Spark is going to improve next month as well... We made a significant improvement to how Netflix was delivered on about the 8th May so June's numbers should be the first month of reasonably clean data for us.
I wouldn't be surprised if we improved again late this month.
Cheers - N
That's good to know.
May move to Spark after all if BigPipe keep going downhill.
Same. I guess my point is that while these figures are useful up to a point for comparison, they're not really indicative of maximum throughput because they're limited by the fact that the majority of customers will only be watch things at 1080p or less. So pointing to these figures and trying to determine whether they mean anything for UHD probably doesn't make sense.
I haven't studied the way Netflix delivers content but some other streaming clients can report back analytics on the time to download a segment and this data is used by the client to determine whether it can cope with a faster rate. For example, one customer may be watching 720p and if using 10 second segment they might come down in 6 seconds average each whereas another might still be watching same stream and each segment could take 2 seconds. The bitrate of the content is an indication but not a good measure of the bandwidth.
The stats may still not indicate the capacity of a connection as often other activity (i.e. it only knows what the Netflix stream is doing) but as an average comparison still interesting and probably quite valid. If the analytics were smart it would also add together more than one Netflix client for that IP. I know we seem to have two separate streams running more often than I would have expected.
[Edit] On the Netflix website they have the following statement - it is looking only like being the content rate rather than speed of download:
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 take the peak three hours of Netflix streaming on a daily basis per ISP.
For 'speed' we measure, in megabits per second (Mbps), the average bitrate for Netflix content streamed by Netflix members per ISP. We measure speed across all available devices.
Excluded from our measurements across all ISP networks are a small number of plans, devices for which we cannot record accurate bitrates and streaming over identified mobile networks.
The speed shown on the Netflix ISP Speed Index is not a measurement of an ISP’s maximum network throughput or capacity.
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