Why would I give a flying f about US ISPs?

 

How is Google even an ISP? They wired one city to test fiber deployment, and that's all.

I wonder why they're all in the 2 to 2.5 Mbps category. This report seems fishy.

 

Because you clicked. Umad?

 

Another possible reason for the lower than expected speeds is that a lot of Netflix content isn't HD. I don't know how much is, but I like to toss on something like X-Files to go to sleep to, and it isn't in HD, so the bandwidth sent/used won't be as high as it would for something like The Walking Dead which is in HD.

 

Aww he maddd...

 

HD Netflix content uses about 5 Mbps and the non-HD content uses about 1 Mbps (based on what I've observed while using Netflix), which is probably why it's around a 2.5 Mbps average even for the fastest connections.

 

"If you?re thinking that these average speeds seem awfully low, you aren?t the only one. After all, Google Fiber is rated at speeds of 1Gbps on the downstream and the upstream. Even Netflix?s own support pages recommend a 5.0Mbps connection for high definition content. Surely something must be amiss, right?"
Seems like leaving headroom to me... 5Mbps flat chat is impractical but as a capacity it's a lot more reasonable when others are using the connection in the household etc.