 Netflix had Telstra bringing up the rear of its list ranking the speed of Australian ISPs over the course of the month, leading to questions as to why the telco would rank so lowly compared to its competitors.
Australian ISPs provided a combined average speed of 2.82 Mbps for April, with Telstra, ranking seventh, posting an average speed of 2.23 Mbps. TPG topped the list, posting an average speed of 3.36 Mbps. Netflix’s speed index lists the average prime-time bitrate for Netflix content streamed to Netflix members during the course of a month, with Netflix taking the peak three hours of Netflix streaming on a daily basis per ISP. “The Telstra Netflix results are not unusual for a national ADSL provider, where the lower averages are due to the extensive size of our ADSL footprint,” Mike Wright, Telstra networks group managing director, wrote via the Telstra Exchange website. “What it does show is that we are delivering a more than reasonable video experience during peak viewing times, providing over 2 Mbps on average across a vast and extensive network area, servicing some 3.9M customers over ~2,800 exchanges.” Wright wrote that the factors influencing the national average include the larger size of the Telstra network over a wider ADSL footprint and customer base, meaning Telstra serves a larger number of customers further away from exchanges, with the longer length of the copper lines causing data speeds to reduce with distance. |
