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Australia and New Zealand have now been added to Netflix’s ISP Speed Index as part of the streaming service’s April update. The regularly updated Index ranks ISPs by “prime time Netflix performance” — essentially how well Netflix runs on the service during peak streaming periods.
In Australia, TPG has been ranked No. 1, closely followed by Optus, while Snap took the top spot in New Zealand. The rankings will be updated monthly, with any changes in positions noted.
The index previously listed the other countries in which Netflix is available, with Australia and New Zealand bringing the count up to 29. In a blog post announcing the additions, Netflix said that Australia and New Zealand ranked 18th and 14th respectively.
The index lists the average bitrate for Netflix streaming content during a particular month — it’s calculated using the peak three hours of Netflix traffic each day for any given ISP. Speed is measured by taking the average bitrate for Netflix content streamed across all available devices.
Netflix’s explanation of the methodology notes that: “excluded from our measurements across all ISP networks are a small number of plans, devices for which we cannot record accurate bitrates and streaming over identified mobile networks.”
As a comparison, TPG posted a 3.36Mbps speed in the April index to get it to first place locally, while the top US ISP, Verizon-FiOS, had 3.55Mbps. Verizon-FIOS runs via a fibre-optic cable network. Out of all available countries, Switzerland’s Improware showed the best performance, with a speed of 4.5Mbps.
