Which ISP Has the Best Netflix Streaming Performance?

Netflix on Thursday released its list of highest-performing ISPs in terms of streaming video performance.

The company posted a chart (below) that mapped out Netflix's streaming performance on U.S. ISPs between October 1 and November 15. Charter Communications, Comcast, and Time Warner were the top performers by the end of the test, delivering streams of about 2,600 to 2,700 kilobits per second by mid-November.

Rounding out the top five were Cox and Suddenlink, followed by Cablevision, Cable One, Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth. At the bottom of the list, which included 16 ISPs, was Clearwire.

"We were glad to be ranked with our wired counterparts, but as the only wireless carrier included in the study we were automatically placed at a disadvantage in terms of speed," a Clearwire spokesman said in an e-mail.

A mobile broadband connection via Clearwire, meanwhile, allows for on-the-go access, "further increasing the value of the Netflix subscription," the spokesman said.

"The throughput we are able to achieve with these streams can tell us a great deal about the actual capacity our subscribers are able to sustain to their homes," Ken Florance, director of content delivery for Netflix, wrote in a blog post. "In the charts … we're using a time-weighted bitrate metric to represent the effective data throughput our subscribers receive over many of the top ISPs."

Netflix's HD streams top out at 4,800 kbps, though no one can currently sustain that on a stream from start to finish, Florance said. Charter leads the pack in the U.S. with an average 2,667 kbps over the period above, while Canada's Rogers reached 3,020 kbps.

Netflix pledged to update its charts monthly.

The data release comes one day after Netflix's most recent earnings call, when the company announced that it had topped 20 million users. In a letter to shareholders, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells also tackled Internet video delivery challenges.

When it comes to Internet video delivery, services like Netflix and ISPs should share the cost, Hastings and Wells wrote.

"We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs," they said.

Today, some ISPs charge Netflix, or other partners, to allow in the bits that their customers have requested from Netflix, "and we think this is inappropriate," Netflix said.

If Netflix pays to get the bits to the regional interchanges, the ISPs shouldn't charge extra when customers access Netflix content, the company said. "Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers," Hastings and Wells said.

Netflix said this should work both ways; a service like Netflix or ESPN3 should not be able to shut off access to an ISP until that ISP pays the content provider, they said.

Recently, Level 3 and Comcast got into a battle over video delivery when Level 3 accused Comcast of violating the principles of net neutrality when it demanded that Level 3 pay a recurring fee for transmitting online movies and other content to Comcast customers. In November, Netflix signed a multi-year deal with Level 3 for streaming capabilities, though it remained unaffected by the Level 3-Comcast fight.

In October, Sandvine reported that Netflix accounted for more than 20 percent of all downstream Internet traffic in North America during the peak usage hours of 8 to 10 pm.

"This may or may not be accurate, but it should be noted that because we pay for the data to be delivered to regional ISP front doors, little of this traffic goes over the Internet or ISP backbone networks, thereby minimizing ISP costs, avoiding congestion, and improving performance for end-using consumers," Hastings and Wells wrote.

Editor's Note: This story was updated Friday with comment from Clearwire.