Netflix ISP ranking: Your Internet service really IS that slow

All I wanted was a relaxing night of catching up on Netflix.

What I got was a stuttering, laggy mess as my home Internet service suffered another attack of performance anxiety that reduced available bandwidth to something one might expect in a developing nation. Eventually I abandoned my plans to binge-watch House of Cards, but even switching into work mode offered no relief: Browser requests routinely timed out as my computer waited in vain for the network to catch up. Before long, I shut everything down entirely and grabbed a book.

I was hardly alone. Netflix now includes Canadian Internet service providers in its global broadband rankings, and of the 14 ISPs surveyed this past April, Rogers delivered 1.67 megabits per second, the slowest average speed in the country. Bell’s fibre optic network topped the list at 3.19 Mbps, and all ISPs averaged 2.52 Mbps.

The Canadian backwater

The bad news? I’m getting less bandwidth than customers in the U.S. (2.33 Mbps), the Netherlands (3.49 Mbps), Sweden (3.21 Mbps) and Denmark (3.167). But on the plus side, I’m ahead of Costa Rica’s barely-better-than-dial-up 1.18 Mbps.

The Netflix-sourced figures point to a disturbing reality. Despite Canada’s reputation as a telecom innovator – we did, after all, invent the telephone – we’ve become an Internet bandwidth backwater. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) 2013 Communications Outlook says Canadian broadband costs rank among the world’s top ten most expensive, which largely explains why Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos called Canadian Internet access “almost Third World,” and added, “It’s almost a human rights violation what they’re charging for Internet access in Canada.”

It’s not just Netflix, either. Ookla, an online performance measurement outfit, says Canada’s 5.67 Mbps average network speed puts it 53^rd in the world – and below the global average of 7.6 Mbps. Hong Kong enjoys a blazing 61 Mbps, South Korea isn’t far behind with 45 Mbps, and Kazakhstan doubles our speed, with 10.77 Mbps. Back in the Canadian slow lanes, if you’re lucky enough to live in a part of the country where your ISP even bothers to offer anything above 10 Mbps, you’ll pay a triple-digit premium, and even then you’re paying only for theoretical top speed. Your mileage may – and, let’s face it, will – vary.

Spiralling demand

None of this would matter much if we used our broadband connections for lightweight activities like sending the occasional email or instant message. But these days we’re leaning ever more heavily on our networks. Data from comScore shows our web-based video consumption spiked 34 per cent last year alone, and we watch 1,769 minutes of video per month – 43 per cent more than Americans do. If the pipes aren’t big or fat enough, our data-hungry video, multimedia and collaboration apps simply won’t work.

Media Technology Monitor says Canadians now spend almost a third of their online time watching video. With 16 per cent of us saying we’re either very likely or somewhat likely to eventually quit our cable or satellite subscriptions entirely and get all our content online, it all points to even more stutter-filled, laggy, frustrating evenings ahead.

I realize this all sounds a bit like the whining complaints of a suburban, information age geek, a so-called first world problem of the highest and most trivial order. But it’s anything but trivial. Because if all of us are paying more for online access and getting less in return than customers around the world or even directly across the border, how are we expected to compete against them in an economy that’s increasingly dependent on the widespread availability of cheap and fast bandwidth?

In short, we can’t. And until we realize our bandwidth-deficient reality is closing our online borders to the economic opportunities of tomorrow, losing a night of Netflix will be the least of our worries.

Carmi Levy is a London, Ont.-based independent technology analyst and journalist. The opinions expressed are his own. carmilevy@yahoo.ca