Optus Remains Fastest Netflix ISP, Telstra The Worst

How does your ISP stack up against the rest in the Netflix stakes? Well, we could descend into fact-absent bickering or, you know, just check out Netflix’s own stats for Australia’s top service providers. It even has recent data and if you’re a Telstra customer, don’t expect to win any of these debates in the near future.

As you can see in the graph above, Telstra takes last position — and a very healthy placing at that on a lowly 2.48Mb/s. On the other hand, Optus flies high in first with 3.41Mb/s, beating second-placed TPG by 0.22Mb/s.

Before you ask, no, the numbers don’t include cellular streaming — it’s purely broadband and takes into account fibre, cable and regular DSL.

Looking at the yearly data, Telstra’s performance fluctuates the most, with a low of 2.09Mb/s and a high of 2.93Mb/s. Even so, its best score is still worse than everything else, including Dodo.

If you’re wondering how Netflix comes up with these numbers, it’s happy to explain:

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.

[Netflix, via TV Tonight]