NZ now 10 in the Netflix ISP index

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andrewcnz

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#174937 11-Jun-2015 14:12

In New Zealand, Bigpipe fell three spots to seventh place with an average speed of 3.11 Mbps, down from 3.45 Mbps in last month’s inaugural ranking for the country. Trustpower and Spark each rose two spots, ranking fourth and sixth with speeds of 3.37 Mbps and 3.17 Mbps, respectively. Overall, New Zealand moved up three spots to No. 10 in our ranking of countries we track, with an average speed of 3.48 Mbps.

http://blog.netflix.com/2015/06/netflix-isp-speed-index-for-may.html?m=1

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#1322808 11-Jun-2015 14:18

Interesting, NZ better than everywhere in the Americas. Bottom half of the pack in Europe.

It will improve too as more people pick up UFB, and the 'Netflix Effect' is worked through.

Countries Compared here.

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#1322809 11-Jun-2015 14:18

XPD / Gavin

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NonprayingMantis

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#1322817 11-Jun-2015 14:40

andrewcnz: In New Zealand, Bigpipe fell three spots to seventh place with an average speed of 3.11 Mbps, down from 3.45 Mbps in last month’s inaugural ranking for the country. Trustpower and Spark each rose two spots, ranking fourth and sixth with speeds of 3.37 Mbps and 3.17 Mbps, respectively. Overall, New Zealand moved up three spots to No. 10 in our ranking of countries we track, with an average speed of 3.48 Mbps.

http://blog.netflix.com/2015/06/netflix-isp-speed-index-for-may.html?m=1

as was discussed last month, the ranking betwen NZ ISPs isn't especially relevant - it just shows which ISPs have greater or fewer connections on Fibre vs rural ADSL, and, for the smaller ISPs our of that lot (Bigpipe, HDnet, Trustpower, probably is just the size of the margin of error when you probably only have a few hundred customers using Netflix)
Most interesting result is the huge improvement from Spark. Presumably this is the impact of putting the Netflix cache in?

However, comparing with other countries is useful. It shows the relative state of broadband infrastructure is actually pretty good. We only have one ISP performing below 3Mbps average speed, which is really really good.
(I think also using the 'average' is also pretty worthless. (More interesting would be the median and standard deviation so we can see the variability)

what's also interesting to me is how they decide which ISPs to include and which to not include. Where is Woosh? where is MyRepublic?

For comparison, take a look, for example, at the UK one. Only 5 ISPs are listed there, yet surely the next few ISPs in the UK after no.5 would be far larger than, say, Orcon. yet doesn't get a mention.

Talkiet

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#1322820 11-Jun-2015 14:57

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

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wellygary

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#1322839 11-Jun-2015 15:17

NonprayingMantis: However, comparing with other countries is useful. It shows the relative state of broadband infrastructure is actually pretty good.

I can see the Outramites massing with their pitchforks as we speak, :)

[yes I know they are getting an upgrade. but it is such a great GZ meme]

Jase2985

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#1322845 11-Jun-2015 15:26

where is my replublic on that list?

they apparently have average speeds miles ahead of everyone else according to their ad

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sen8or

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#1322911 11-Jun-2015 16:29

There was a herald article today talking about smart TVs and a comment that for UHD streaming a 15Mbps speed is required. Am I right or wrong in interpreting it that none of the ISPs average Netflix delivery is fast enough for UHD?

Jase2985

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#1322912 11-Jun-2015 16:32

average yes, but remember what an average is

but rememeber there a probably well over 50% of people in NZ on ADSL and the average of that is probably well under 10mbps so that will be servilely impacting the average.

if you have VDSL or UFB i cant see why you couldnt hit 15mbps, but who offers much of that at the moment?

sidefx

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#1322914 11-Jun-2015 16:36

I also wonder how they produce their numbers. For example if every customer of an ISP only watches netflix at 720p would that pull down their average?

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#1322915 11-Jun-2015 16:37

sidefx: I also wonder how they produce their numbers. For example if every customer of an ISP only watches netflix at 720p would that pull down their average?

i would think so

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#1322917 11-Jun-2015 16:39

Jase2985: where is my replublic on that list?

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.

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#1322918 11-Jun-2015 16:40

Jase2985:
i would think so

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.

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BigPipeNZ

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#1322926 11-Jun-2015 16:49

sen8or: There was a herald article today talking about smart TVs and a comment that for UHD streaming a 15Mbps speed is required. Am I right or wrong in interpreting it that none of the ISPs average Netflix delivery is fast enough for UHD?

you are right, except it's totally irrelevant.

bear in mind that not much content is available in 4K, and you need a 4K device for it to actually stream at all. Netflix won't deliver it in 4K if it's not available in 4k, or if your device can't handle 4k.

This average will be the average of all streams from Netflix to customers of that ISP.

so it will include things like poor wifi impacting the bitrate, using a mobile device instead of a big screen (an HD stream to an iphone will be vastly lower bitrate than an HD stream to a PS4, for example)

so it's the pure average of all of that, and as such is totally irrelevant when comparing which ISP will be good for a specific person.

Imagine we had only 3 customers, all of whom have Gigatown 1000Mbps UFB plan

Customer 1: streams via his Chrome browser to his laptop. the content he happens to pick is something older, and so only available on Netflix in 1750kbps
Customer 2: streams to his iphone via wifi. Netflix chooses to stream the content at 480kbps because his screen size makes anything bigger totally pointless.
customer 3: lives in an apartment block where wifi congestion is terrible and has a really crummy router , so streaming over wifi to his PS4 is limited to only 3Mbps

I promise you that the above 3 scenarios are massively more common than people who have a fully 4K capable setup (and use it for 4k content)

If those were our only 3 customers, Netflix would report the average of those three and that would only be about 1.75Mbps, placing us in lst place by a significant amount. despite the ISP infrastructure delivering a broadband speed of 1000Mbps in all cases.

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Publius

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#1322946 11-Jun-2015 18:07

BigPipeNZ:
sen8or: There was a herald article today talking about smart TVs and a comment that for UHD streaming a 15Mbps speed is required. Am I right or wrong in interpreting it that none of the ISPs average Netflix delivery is fast enough for UHD?

you are right, except it's totally irrelevant.

bear in mind that not much content is available in 4K, and you need a 4K device for it to actually stream at all. Netflix won't deliver it in 4K if it's not available in 4k, or if your device can't handle 4k.

This average will be the average of all streams from Netflix to customers of that ISP.

so it will include things like poor wifi impacting the bitrate, using a mobile device instead of a big screen (an HD stream to an iphone will be vastly lower bitrate than an HD stream to a PS4, for example)

so it's the pure average of all of that, and as such is totally irrelevant when comparing which ISP will be good for a specific person.

Imagine we had only 3 customers, all of whom have Gigatown 1000Mbps UFB plan

Customer 1: streams via his Chrome browser to his laptop. the content he happens to pick is something older, and so only available on Netflix in 1750kbps
Customer 2: streams to his iphone via wifi. Netflix chooses to stream the content at 480kbps because his screen size makes anything bigger totally pointless.
customer 3: lives in an apartment block where wifi congestion is terrible and has a really crummy router , so streaming over wifi to his PS4 is limited to only 3Mbps

I promise you that the above 3 scenarios are massively more common than people who have a fully 4K capable setup (and use it for 4k content)

If those were our only 3 customers, Netflix would report the average of those three and that would only be about 1.75Mbps, placing us in lst place by a significant amount. despite the ISP infrastructure delivering a broadband speed of 1000Mbps in all cases.

So now that BipPipe ranks behind Spark in the netflix speed index, are you staying that your customers are more likely to be watching on smaller devices or crappier wifi than Spark's? I would have thought the opposite myself.

Your point about 4K is completely valid tho. There's next to zero chance of getting a 4K stream unless you buy a specific TV. It's hard enough to get even 1080p.

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#1322966 11-Jun-2015 18:33

Jase2985: ...that will be servilely impacting the average.

Archaic vocabulary on a tech oriented forum. Damme ye, Sir Auto-Correct?

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