Netflix Reveals Best UK and Irish ISPs for Streaming
How did your ISP do?
Netflix UK has released a list ranking internet service providers (ISPs) in the United Kingdom for streaming TV and movies. The video-on-demand company, which entered the UK market in January of last year, plans to release this type of list once a month.
"These ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISP," Netflix explained, adding, "The average is well below the peak performance due to many factors including home WiFi, the variety of devices our members use, and the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and movies we carry. Those factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs, so these relative rankings are a good indicator of the consistent performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network and a great way to see which ISPs offer the best Netflix experience."
The first list was released last month and placed Virgin, O2, and BT in the top three spots for the UK. How do things look for this month? November's rankings remain unchanged with Virgin, O2, and BT occupying the top spots for the UK. BSkyB, TalkTalk, and EverythingEverywhere bring up the rear in the same order as November, 2012. Even the order for mobile internet providers is the same (Vodafone, O2, Everything Everywhere, 3). It's the Irish market where things have actually changed. November saw UPC, Magnet, and Imagine fill the top three spots. December's rankings saw Digiweb boot Imagine out of third place. This is a big jump for Digiweb, which was in fifth place in November.
The UK's top ISP, Virgin, posted average speeds of 2.16Mbps in December, while Ireland's UPC clocked in at 2.11Mbps.

UK and Ireland aren't doing so well...
Virgin Media's "up to" 100Mbps service was the fastest, with the research suggesting average actual speeds of 88.3Mbps over a 24-hour period.
The average download speed on BT Infinity's "up to" 76Mbps service was 58.5Mbps.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19267090
im on virgin 100mb and get 100mb most of the time.
On the flip side, if the broadband is slower than dialup at times and is terrible for gaming (due to 500 ms ping to a server 50 miles away)...
(Which is my ISP, which has a monopoly in the area)
I remember going from 56k to a cable modem, only to reveal that a web server might still be getting 56k speeds because of the server itself.
Now, the 1GB/hour is not an exact figure, which would explain why Google Fiber's average speed is 2.55Mbps.
If you look at the results from speedtest.net by country averaged for the last 30 days, you get a different picture.
U.S. average = 15.38
U.K. average = 19.24
Source: http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/