8 ms·

Netflix says Google Fiber is "most consistently fast ISP in America"

152 points by Libertatea 14y ago

shurane 14y ago
isn't 2.55 Megabits/s for Google Fiber a bit low? I imagine Netflix throttles the bandwidth. After all, there's no point downloading the whole movie if a person decides to switch to something else after 10 minutes. If throttling is happening, what is Netflix testing then?
- notJim 14y ago
  The Ars article biffed, it should be megabytes per second (MBps vs Mbps). It's kind of confusing on the Netflix graphic, because the headings are in all caps, so you just have to use context/knowledge to differentiate.
  - majormajor 14y ago
    From the mention of a "variety of encodes" affecting their numbers, my interpretation of this figure is the average bandwidth used to stream a video to a subscriber, and in that case 2.55MBps sounds shockingly high for an online streaming video bitrate. 2.55MBps would put it a bit above over-the-air broadcast MPEG2 HD rates, whereas not everything on Netflix is HD, and I would assume they're using more efficient codecs than MPEG2. Especially since, from my past experience, I know that they have HD streams that are playable on sub-6Mbps connections. EDIT: and as tedchs points out, the other provider numbers definitely reinforce the interpretation of it being Mbps: I don't think I've ever seen AT&T advertise a non-Uverse DSL speed of above 6Mbps, which wouldn't let it hit 1.5MBps.
    - notJim 14y ago
      Read my reply to tedchs, I believe he[assuming] is still reading the numbers wrong, including the mobile numbers. I'm not sure about your numbers, as I'm finding a bunch of conflicting information online. From what I've seen, an HDTV quality stream would be around 2 MBps, but I've also seen numbers closer to what you're reporting. It's conceivable to me that Netflix could do a quick speedtest that would exceed the video bitrate when testing your connection for HD-ness. In any case, I might be wrong. Netflix should really clarify this. There are people arguing about the same thing in the comments to that article.
    - JshWright 14y ago
      It doesn't have to be 2.55MBps averaged over the entire stream. It could be 2.55MBps during bursts of buffering. That being said... Listing the headers in all caps (without so much as clarifying in the accompanying post) was a mean thing to do...
      - redthrowaway 14y ago
        I'd argue that deciding to name 8 bits a byte and making the abbreviation of the latter simply the capitalization of the former was an ill-considered choice, and has led to much confusion, consternation, and gnashing of teeth over the years.
        sliverstorm 14y ago
        If we could just agree to use only one or the other, we'd be fine!
        noselasd 14y ago
        We should adopt the telecom term octet, and just get rid of the term byte. Then again "Megaoctet" doesn't quite flow, but there would be no confusion between a bit and an octet however you abbreviate it. We're still left with is deciding whether to multiply by 1000 or 1024 for each magnitude though.
  - tedchs 14y ago
    Actually, my read of it is megabits-per-second is correct, when you consider that the mobile connections at the bottom are going to get approx. 700 kilobits per second (kbps) consistently. Google's performance here is representative of the fact that most people do not have gigabit connections all the way to their Netflix-streaming devices, for example if they are using Wi-Fi.
    - notJim 14y ago
      I believe you are still getting the numbers wrong. There's no way Google Fiber only hits 2.55 Mbps consistently. That's slower than the slowest speed advertised by crappy ATT DSL that would be barely be fast enough to watch Netflix at all. Regarding the mobile speeds, 700 KBps sounds about right for someone on a 3G (LTE or HSPA (T-Mobile)) connection. I just did a test right now, and I get about 900 KBps Also, regarding your last point, most people probably at least have 802.11g by now, which maxes at 54 Mbps, waaay above 2.55 Mbps.
      - trotsky 14y ago
        Lots of content on netflix isn't encoded in hd which means the average stream rate includes many streams that can't go above 1.xMbps. And their top stream rate for hd last time i checked was something like 6Mbps - clearly ruling out anyones average stream from netflix being 2MBps.
    - revelation 14y ago
      No, WiFi or your cheap local home router do not play into this. The only possible interpretation is that Google Fiber allows netflix to on average deliver higher bitrates compared to competitors. The reason you don't see higher speeds is because there is no point in streaming at a higher bandwidth than the content actually offers. All in all, these are terribly misleading statistics. At best, they suggest that Googles competitors can't get their shit together to even allow for one HD stream.
      - Retric 14y ago
        It's not uncommon for people to try and stream 2 Netflix movies at the same time though a single internet connection.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    A plea from all those who try and understand which acronym is being used - we will not think less of you if you use Mbits/sec and MBytes/sec - and I suspect the rate of confusion will be somewhat reduced. (There are those who aren't aware that Mbits/second is the "SI" sense of "Mega, and think that there are not 1048576 bits/second in a Mbit/second, but, we'll leave that for another day)
    - Firehed 14y ago
      > (There are those who aren't aware that Mbits/second is the "SI" sense of "Mega, and think that there are not 1048576 bits/second in a Mbit/second, but, we'll leave that for another day) To be fair, that 2.4% KB/KiB delta isn't terribly interesting until it's into the "giga" or "tera" prefixes (where it compounds to 10-12%). Given you see way more than that in bandwidth fluctuation anyway, it's even less relevant. Plus we always measure our files in byte-suffixed units rather than -bit, which increases the confusion by a factor of 8. That's how I "lost" half a terabyte in my NAS :( Knew that going in, but that's still a crazy amount of storage to apparently disappear due to a naming convention.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    No way it's megabytes per second. WiFi G mode provides a theoretical cap of 6.75MByte/s, and we all know you'll never see that. Protocol overhead combined with interference and range, and you're lucky if you can keep it above 1MByte/s. Yes, WiFi N is proliferating, but it still has a host of caveats. A single-channel N device with a 20MHz span, instead of 40MHz, still only gets 9MByte/s theoretical max. Yes, I know, you can use a wired connection. You can have dual-channel N and you can use 40MHz span, but we're talking about average rates. Most folks I've seen don't use wired. Most N devices are single-channel, and I read again and again that most 2.4GHz networks will actually perform better in 20MHz mode (due to interference)
- majormajor 14y ago
  My guess is that Netflix is reporting the average stream bandwidth accessed by customers of each ISP. So if video X has streams at 500kbps, 1Mbps, 2Mbps, and 5Mbps, then a higher percentage of Google Fiber users being able to reliably stream the 5Mbps feed instead of just one of the lower-bitrate ones would result in a higher average. So there would be a built-in ceiling of the highest bitrate Netflix offers. And based on this data, I'm guessing that for a bunch of their content, their streams max out around 2-3Mbps (which is a reasonable bitrate for 720p film/TV content).
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  The highest rate for netflix streaming is ~600kb/s (5Mbps). Since many movies are not in HD, and compression efficiency varies according to image complexity, that's right on the bat. You're not going to use the other 995mbps for video streaming unless you send uncompressed 4k frames. Even monstruous 8k video (7680x4320) compresses to ~600mbps.
- mtgx 14y ago
  I found it odd too that it does only slightly better than the others, but I think that's the max speed Netflix needs on average. If say Netflix were to stream 4k content, then Google Fiber numbers would show something like 100 Mbps, and the others would be left in the dust, since even with their max speeds they can't handle that.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jcdavis 14y ago
I'd love to see more regional ISPs on this list. Kinda annoying to see Google under "Major ISPs" when they only serve a single city currently
JoeCortopassi 14y ago
Is anybody really surprised by this? I mean, Google has some of the best and brightest engineers working for them, a substantial budget, a purpose other than profitable retail of their service, and a tiny town outside of major populations to work with. I would be hard pressed to find a reason why they wouldn't be faster than anyone else out there. Shoot, I bet you could find similarly sized cities were Verizon/Comcast/Charter handily beat Google Fiber. Don't get me wrong, I love that they are doing this, but everything breaks at scale EDIT: Misread the part about it being Kansas City vs. a city in Kansas. I feel my point about scale still stands, as Kansas City in total (Missouri and Kansas) is in the 6-700,000 person range, and is still a fraction of total user base of the other ISPs mentioned
- wmeredith 14y ago
  >Tiny Town!? There's 2 million people in the Kansas City metro area. (I'm from Kansas City. Grumble.. grumble...)
  - jfoutz 14y ago
    well... it looks like the population of KS and central Kansas City MO (where google actually is) is way less than a million people. Comcast, on the other hand, covers about 100 million people. That includes those 1.5 million google skipped.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    For many people who spend most of their time in SF, anything other than SF, LA, and NYC is "flyover country".
    - rayiner 14y ago
      It's absolutely hilarious to put SF in the same category as LA and NYC.
      - w1ntermute 14y ago
        That's why I had the qualifier that it only applied to people in SF. Their view that SF is in the same category as LA and NYC shows how myopic and inward-looking many of the people in SF are.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Interesting, having used Netflix and having it 'step down' from HD to not HD when something kicked in (like a Windows update) this result suggests that they are pretty good at traffic management as well. That was one of the questions I had for my sister who lives in Kansas City. Now this also means that folks will start advertising their botnets for a premium if they have a strong contingent of 'Google' hosts. And that will be the next interesting test. If Google can run as an ISP and effectively deal with zombie PCs (which is to say mitigate them), they will replace any other ISP out there just because operationally they are that much more efficient. Still waiting to hear which city is #2 on the list.
tsotha 14y ago
Bah. Verizon stopped installing FIOS and Google wired Kansas City. I don't care how fast your service is if you don't offer it where I live.
DigitalSea 14y ago
And in other news, the sky is blue and Barack Obama is the president of the United States once more. Google have access to some of the best engineers money can buy, they're certainly not broke and can afford to invest into better infrastructure and the means for implementing it, not to mention they don't have a legacy customer base or legacy infrastructure to consider either.
saltzman 14y ago
Bring it to San Jose and we'll see what's up!
bajsejohannes 14y ago
This is a great move by Netflix. It will hopefully be visible enough that ISPs will try increasing their standing, which is ends up being good for customers.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  I wish you were right. My ISP (Time Warner Cable) is basically openly hostile towards its customers and can afford to be since it has a de facto monopoly position where I live. I'm pretty sure this Netflix report will do nothing to get them to fix their many, many problems. I'm very hopeful that in the long term Google Fiber will make a big impact on the ISP landscape here in the United States, but I think it is going to take a very long time and the entrenched players are going to have to be dragged into the present kicking and screaming (and lobbying) and Google is going to have to expand a LOT more before the other guys start making real changes.
  - politician 14y ago
    Is CLEAR (4G WiMax) an option for you? It works pretty well here in Austin, and by well I mean streaming video with minimal buffering.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      I haven't tried it but probably not. I do a lot of Xbox Live gaming and I've heard bad things about Clear wrt/ gaming latency (though I've heard it is nice for lots of other use cases).
    - untog 14y ago
      A friend here in NYC tells me that the CLEAR service often gets terrible at peak times.
      - evoxed 14y ago
        Pretty much everything gets terrible at peak times in NYC.
techsupporter 14y ago
Netflix appears capable of breaking out fiber versus DSL subscribers of the same ISP, so I wish they'd separate Frontier FiOS[0] from Frontier DSL. It would be nice to see how the ex-Verizon system is still doing in comparison to its much more prevalent cousin. 0 - Yes, it is still called FiOS even when being sold and serviced via Frontier: http://www.frontierforhome.com/fios/triple.php http://www.frontierforhome.com/fios/triple.php
mikeevans 14y ago
I wonder how the customer service is.
Mordor 14y ago
Google's objective appears to be in delivering the best quality broadband, instead of driving profits. A great comparison to this would be Apple under Steve Jobs. Patiently awaiting for Google's entry into the mobile broadband domain...
benologist 14y ago
Thanks Ars, nobody could have guessed that the "super fast internet" is the "most fast" without your help!

152 points by Libertatea 14y ago

isn't 2.55 Megabits/s for Google Fiber a bit low? I imagine Netflix throttles the bandwidth. After all, there's no point downloading the whole movie if a person decides to switch to something else after 10 minutes. If throttling is happening, what is Netflix testing then?

notJim 14y ago
The Ars article biffed, it should be megabytes per second (MBps vs Mbps). It's kind of confusing on the Netflix graphic, because the headings are in all caps, so you just have to use context/knowledge to differentiate.
- majormajor 14y ago
  From the mention of a "variety of encodes" affecting their numbers, my interpretation of this figure is the average bandwidth used to stream a video to a subscriber, and in that case 2.55MBps sounds shockingly high for an online streaming video bitrate. 2.55MBps would put it a bit above over-the-air broadcast MPEG2 HD rates, whereas not everything on Netflix is HD, and I would assume they're using more efficient codecs than MPEG2. Especially since, from my past experience, I know that they have HD streams that are playable on sub-6Mbps connections. EDIT: and as tedchs points out, the other provider numbers definitely reinforce the interpretation of it being Mbps: I don't think I've ever seen AT&T advertise a non-Uverse DSL speed of above 6Mbps, which wouldn't let it hit 1.5MBps.
  - notJim 14y ago
    Read my reply to tedchs, I believe he[assuming] is still reading the numbers wrong, including the mobile numbers. I'm not sure about your numbers, as I'm finding a bunch of conflicting information online. From what I've seen, an HDTV quality stream would be around 2 MBps, but I've also seen numbers closer to what you're reporting. It's conceivable to me that Netflix could do a quick speedtest that would exceed the video bitrate when testing your connection for HD-ness. In any case, I might be wrong. Netflix should really clarify this. There are people arguing about the same thing in the comments to that article.
  - JshWright 14y ago
    It doesn't have to be 2.55MBps averaged over the entire stream. It could be 2.55MBps during bursts of buffering. That being said... Listing the headers in all caps (without so much as clarifying in the accompanying post) was a mean thing to do...
    - redthrowaway 14y ago
      I'd argue that deciding to name 8 bits a byte and making the abbreviation of the latter simply the capitalization of the former was an ill-considered choice, and has led to much confusion, consternation, and gnashing of teeth over the years.
      - sliverstorm 14y ago
        If we could just agree to use only one or the other, we'd be fine!
      - noselasd 14y ago
        We should adopt the telecom term octet, and just get rid of the term byte. Then again "Megaoctet" doesn't quite flow, but there would be no confusion between a bit and an octet however you abbreviate it. We're still left with is deciding whether to multiply by 1000 or 1024 for each magnitude though.
- tedchs 14y ago
  Actually, my read of it is megabits-per-second is correct, when you consider that the mobile connections at the bottom are going to get approx. 700 kilobits per second (kbps) consistently. Google's performance here is representative of the fact that most people do not have gigabit connections all the way to their Netflix-streaming devices, for example if they are using Wi-Fi.
  - notJim 14y ago
    I believe you are still getting the numbers wrong. There's no way Google Fiber only hits 2.55 Mbps consistently. That's slower than the slowest speed advertised by crappy ATT DSL that would be barely be fast enough to watch Netflix at all. Regarding the mobile speeds, 700 KBps sounds about right for someone on a 3G (LTE or HSPA (T-Mobile)) connection. I just did a test right now, and I get about 900 KBps Also, regarding your last point, most people probably at least have 802.11g by now, which maxes at 54 Mbps, waaay above 2.55 Mbps.
    - trotsky 14y ago
      Lots of content on netflix isn't encoded in hd which means the average stream rate includes many streams that can't go above 1.xMbps. And their top stream rate for hd last time i checked was something like 6Mbps - clearly ruling out anyones average stream from netflix being 2MBps.
  - revelation 14y ago
    No, WiFi or your cheap local home router do not play into this. The only possible interpretation is that Google Fiber allows netflix to on average deliver higher bitrates compared to competitors. The reason you don't see higher speeds is because there is no point in streaming at a higher bandwidth than the content actually offers. All in all, these are terribly misleading statistics. At best, they suggest that Googles competitors can't get their shit together to even allow for one HD stream.
    - Retric 14y ago
      It's not uncommon for people to try and stream 2 Netflix movies at the same time though a single internet connection.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  A plea from all those who try and understand which acronym is being used - we will not think less of you if you use Mbits/sec and MBytes/sec - and I suspect the rate of confusion will be somewhat reduced. (There are those who aren't aware that Mbits/second is the "SI" sense of "Mega, and think that there are not 1048576 bits/second in a Mbit/second, but, we'll leave that for another day)
  - Firehed 14y ago
    > (There are those who aren't aware that Mbits/second is the "SI" sense of "Mega, and think that there are not 1048576 bits/second in a Mbit/second, but, we'll leave that for another day) To be fair, that 2.4% KB/KiB delta isn't terribly interesting until it's into the "giga" or "tera" prefixes (where it compounds to 10-12%). Given you see way more than that in bandwidth fluctuation anyway, it's even less relevant. Plus we always measure our files in byte-suffixed units rather than -bit, which increases the confusion by a factor of 8. That's how I "lost" half a terabyte in my NAS :( Knew that going in, but that's still a crazy amount of storage to apparently disappear due to a naming convention.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  No way it's megabytes per second. WiFi G mode provides a theoretical cap of 6.75MByte/s, and we all know you'll never see that. Protocol overhead combined with interference and range, and you're lucky if you can keep it above 1MByte/s. Yes, WiFi N is proliferating, but it still has a host of caveats. A single-channel N device with a 20MHz span, instead of 40MHz, still only gets 9MByte/s theoretical max. Yes, I know, you can use a wired connection. You can have dual-channel N and you can use 40MHz span, but we're talking about average rates. Most folks I've seen don't use wired. Most N devices are single-channel, and I read again and again that most 2.4GHz networks will actually perform better in 20MHz mode (due to interference)
majormajor 14y ago
My guess is that Netflix is reporting the average stream bandwidth accessed by customers of each ISP. So if video X has streams at 500kbps, 1Mbps, 2Mbps, and 5Mbps, then a higher percentage of Google Fiber users being able to reliably stream the 5Mbps feed instead of just one of the lower-bitrate ones would result in a higher average. So there would be a built-in ceiling of the highest bitrate Netflix offers. And based on this data, I'm guessing that for a bunch of their content, their streams max out around 2-3Mbps (which is a reasonable bitrate for 720p film/TV content).
ricardobeat 14y ago
The highest rate for netflix streaming is ~600kb/s (5Mbps). Since many movies are not in HD, and compression efficiency varies according to image complexity, that's right on the bat. You're not going to use the other 995mbps for video streaming unless you send uncompressed 4k frames. Even monstruous 8k video (7680x4320) compresses to ~600mbps.
mtgx 14y ago
I found it odd too that it does only slightly better than the others, but I think that's the max speed Netflix needs on average. If say Netflix were to stream 4k content, then Google Fiber numbers would show something like 100 Mbps, and the others would be left in the dust, since even with their max speeds they can't handle that.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jcdavis 14y ago

I'd love to see more regional ISPs on this list. Kinda annoying to see Google under "Major ISPs" when they only serve a single city currently

JoeCortopassi 14y ago

Is anybody really surprised by this? I mean, Google has some of the best and brightest engineers working for them, a substantial budget, a purpose other than profitable retail of their service, and a tiny town outside of major populations to work with. I would be hard pressed to find a reason why they wouldn't be faster than anyone else out there. Shoot, I bet you could find similarly sized cities were Verizon/Comcast/Charter handily beat Google Fiber. Don't get me wrong, I love that they are doing this, but everything breaks at scale EDIT: Misread the part about it being Kansas City vs. a city in Kansas. I feel my point about scale still stands, as Kansas City in total (Missouri and Kansas) is in the 6-700,000 person range, and is still a fraction of total user base of the other ISPs mentioned

wmeredith 14y ago
>Tiny Town!? There's 2 million people in the Kansas City metro area. (I'm from Kansas City. Grumble.. grumble...)
- jfoutz 14y ago
  well... it looks like the population of KS and central Kansas City MO (where google actually is) is way less than a million people. Comcast, on the other hand, covers about 100 million people. That includes those 1.5 million google skipped.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  For many people who spend most of their time in SF, anything other than SF, LA, and NYC is "flyover country".
  - rayiner 14y ago
    It's absolutely hilarious to put SF in the same category as LA and NYC.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      That's why I had the qualifier that it only applied to people in SF. Their view that SF is in the same category as LA and NYC shows how myopic and inward-looking many of the people in SF are.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Interesting, having used Netflix and having it 'step down' from HD to not HD when something kicked in (like a Windows update) this result suggests that they are pretty good at traffic management as well. That was one of the questions I had for my sister who lives in Kansas City. Now this also means that folks will start advertising their botnets for a premium if they have a strong contingent of 'Google' hosts. And that will be the next interesting test. If Google can run as an ISP and effectively deal with zombie PCs (which is to say mitigate them), they will replace any other ISP out there just because operationally they are that much more efficient. Still waiting to hear which city is #2 on the list.

tsotha 14y ago

Bah. Verizon stopped installing FIOS and Google wired Kansas City. I don't care how fast your service is if you don't offer it where I live.

DigitalSea 14y ago

And in other news, the sky is blue and Barack Obama is the president of the United States once more. Google have access to some of the best engineers money can buy, they're certainly not broke and can afford to invest into better infrastructure and the means for implementing it, not to mention they don't have a legacy customer base or legacy infrastructure to consider either.

saltzman 14y ago

Bring it to San Jose and we'll see what's up!

bajsejohannes 14y ago

This is a great move by Netflix. It will hopefully be visible enough that ISPs will try increasing their standing, which is ends up being good for customers.

georgemcbay 14y ago
I wish you were right. My ISP (Time Warner Cable) is basically openly hostile towards its customers and can afford to be since it has a de facto monopoly position where I live. I'm pretty sure this Netflix report will do nothing to get them to fix their many, many problems. I'm very hopeful that in the long term Google Fiber will make a big impact on the ISP landscape here in the United States, but I think it is going to take a very long time and the entrenched players are going to have to be dragged into the present kicking and screaming (and lobbying) and Google is going to have to expand a LOT more before the other guys start making real changes.
- politician 14y ago
  Is CLEAR (4G WiMax) an option for you? It works pretty well here in Austin, and by well I mean streaming video with minimal buffering.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    I haven't tried it but probably not. I do a lot of Xbox Live gaming and I've heard bad things about Clear wrt/ gaming latency (though I've heard it is nice for lots of other use cases).
  - untog 14y ago
    A friend here in NYC tells me that the CLEAR service often gets terrible at peak times.
    - evoxed 14y ago
      Pretty much everything gets terrible at peak times in NYC.

techsupporter 14y ago

Netflix appears capable of breaking out fiber versus DSL subscribers of the same ISP, so I wish they'd separate Frontier FiOS[0] from Frontier DSL. It would be nice to see how the ex-Verizon system is still doing in comparison to its much more prevalent cousin. 0 - Yes, it is still called FiOS even when being sold and serviced via Frontier: http://www.frontierforhome.com/fios/triple.php http://www.frontierforhome.com/fios/triple.php

mikeevans 14y ago

I wonder how the customer service is.

Mordor 14y ago

Google's objective appears to be in delivering the best quality broadband, instead of driving profits. A great comparison to this would be Apple under Steve Jobs. Patiently awaiting for Google's entry into the mobile broadband domain...

benologist 14y ago

Thanks Ars, nobody could have guessed that the "super fast internet" is the "most fast" without your help!