Netflix Hands Out Its ISP Report Cards. Clearwire, Please Get This One Signed by Your Parents.

January 27, 2011 at 11:01 am PT

Here’s the report card that Netflix promised to produce on broadband providers’ performance yesterday. Which is really a not-so subtle salvo in a war of words between the streaming movie service and the ISP industry.

But then again, it’s not the most aggressive move Reed Hastings could make. Note that the chart Netflix provides makes it quite difficult to really evaluate broadband provider against broadband provider, without doing a whole lot of squinting.

And even then, I can’t tell which light-blue line represents CableOne and which one represents CenturyTel.

We do know, because Netflix already told us, that Charter gets the best marks. And it appears that Clearwire, the wireless service co-owned by Sprint and some of the big cable companies, ranks dead last.

The news that most of you care about: Time Warner Cable and Comcast, the nation’s two biggest cable companies, appear to be in the top part of Netflix’s rankings. I’m asking the company for clarification for those of us with decaying vision.

And here it is, via CNET–a top-to-bottom ranking:

1. Charter
2. Comcast
3. Time Warner
4. Cox
5. Suddenlink
6. Cablevision
7. Cable One
8. Verizon
9. AT&T
10. BellSouth
11. Embarq
12. Windstream
13. Qwest
14. Century Tel
15. Frontier
16. Clearwire

You can click on the chart below to see a larger version, and you can read a technical explanation of what it measures over at the official Netflix tech blog.

Tagged with: AT&T, BellSouth, blog, broadband, Cable One, CableOne, Cablevision, Century Tel, CenturyTel, charter, Clearwire, Comcast, Cox, Embarq, entertainment, Frontier, industry, Internet, ISP, MediaMemo, movie, Netflix, performance, Peter Kafka, politics, providers, Qwest, ranking, Reed Hastings, service, software, Sprint, streaming, Suddenlink, television, Time Warner, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, video, Windstream, wireless

comments so far. Add yours.

Anonymous

LOL, Nice! Now thats what I am talking about.

http://www.total-anonymity.edu.tc
Anonymous

Far from being disappointed, I am impressed that Clearwire is on the list at all. The others are mostly cable ISPs — wired. I would have expected higher numbers from them, frankly. But the fact that I could take my laptop anywhere I wanted to, and not be stuck at home with my wired connection, and connect at over 1,400 kb/s is amazing.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BE6MQNYW6FWS2VL3FWBNRTGNAQ Jason G

Sad to see that Charter Communications was at the top of the list; even more sad to know that their customer service has to be at the bottome. In SoCal and just made the leap to Verizons FIOS and have been amazed to find a ISP who understands how to treat customers!
Anonymous

Clearwire needs to get out of the way…
Clearwire’s Spectrum Grab – Our Community 2.5GHz Educational Broadband Service (EBS) Spectrumhttp://www.digitalcommunities.com/blogs/broadband-nation/
Anonymous

First problem is that starting the Y axis at 1000 Kbps is the oldest trick in the world. You can make the smallest difference look massive when you don’t start at zero.

Second problem is that these are averages, and the ISPs with more rural regions and lower service tiers (768 Kbps) are penalized on averages. It’s quite possible that a middle of the pack ISP on average actually has the most high speed streams. As for Clearwire, they’re a wireless provider with shared WiMAX cells.

Also, Netflix likes to tell their users “your network is slowing down” when a stream quality degrades. They don’t ever say “our network or servers are slowing down”. This is relevant because those bandwidth numbers could easily be interpreted as the ISPs that Netflix buys the most/least bandwidth from. I think Netflix really wants to believe that it’s “your network” because they don’t want to pay for any part of it http://bit.ly/ejIV3Y, even though this is a horribly shortsighted strategy to be killing the broadband goose.

Hastings also seems to be confusing his bits or byte talking points or he’s trying to mislead us when he tells the media:

“Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.”

There’s no way broadband providers charge $1 per gigabyte for paid peering. Paid peering is always cheaper than generic Internet transit service and at the quantities that Netflix buys, it is probably around $1 per Mbps/month which works out to $1 per 324 GB. Each of Netflix’s movies is a little over 1 GB so it means that $1 will deliver ~300 movies over broadband and even the heaviest user will have a hard time reaching 300 movies a month on Netflix. By contrast, Netflix spends $1 on postage per DVD mailed.

So even if we’re talking 3.24 GB per HD movie stream, the paid peering bandwidth only costs 1 cent per HD movie. That’s compared to 100 cents for DVD round trip postage. Netflix is complaining about a 1 cent per HD movie charge.
Anonymous

We just released a response over at the CLEAR blog, and we’re proud to be on that list, being the only provider allowing you to stream Netflix while you’re on the bus or traveling. http://www.clear.com/blog/netf.....-clear-4g/

Cecile at CLEAR
http://twitter.com/mstabile Mike Stabile

Ditto! Charter to Verizon FIOS last year.