Netflix Speeds In The US Fail To Match Europe Despite ISP Deals

If you’re looking for a faster connection to watch your favorite shows and movies on Netflix, you might want to consider moving to Europe. Though U.S. Internet service providers showed speed improvements in September, with an average speed of 2.72 Mbps, their numbers pale in comparison to the speedy performance of Netflix in France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg, which all averaged 3.12 Mbps.

For the fastest Netflix speeds, your best bet would be Switzerland, where Quickline took the top performance spot with an average speed of 4.15 Mbps. U.S. ISPs haven’t been able to match those speeds, even with Verizon FiOS leading the pack with an average of 3.17 Mbps (which is still slower than the last place ISP in Switzerland). Overall, the U.S. came in 14th place, after Canada and Ireland.

Netflix performance on Verizon FiOS was previously much slower with an average speed of 1.61 Mbps in July. But after the two companies struck a deal for direct access to the Verizon network, speeds have skyrocketed. The deal mirrors agreements made with Netflix and a number of ISPs such as Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable to improve the service’s performance on their networks. Despite the deals, Netflix has been vocal in its opposition to the fees charged by ISPs to connect the service directly to ISP networks.

There were some concerns that Netflix would run into similar obstacles as it expanded into Europe. But it appears that it has managed to avoid them through a number of deals with European ISPs and content providers, according to Gigaom.

The average speeds reported are based on data collected from over 50 million Netflix members that stream over 1 billion hours of shows and movies each month, according to the company.