For the record, here are Netflix's suggested bandwidth needs (not just to your router, but this is the speed your device should be connecting to Netflix at + some buffer).
-
typical Netflix bandwidth needs
- Most people will want to make sure they have set their netflix quality preference here to
highest
- And to see if your neck of the woods w/ your ISP qualifies for "Super HD" (they actually put their servers at your ISP, and offer to do it at no cost to the ISP) you can check
that here. If your ISP doesn't support it yet, write them emails and tweet them to ask why not.
Here is a screenshot of my Asus's traffic monitor, the only thing I'm doing right now from WAN to LAN is streaming Netflix. I'm watching House of Cards on my TiVo which should be in Netflix's HD mode, or even potentially Super HD (though my ISP doesn't have the servers officially yet, and when I go to the test web page mentioned above it says I'm not in a Super HD area yet, however my
TiVo's screen for House of Cards says "available in Super HD on this device"). So I don't know quite what to make of that, but. . .I'm currently getting around
460 KB/s average over trailing 5 min, which is about 3.5 Mb/s, which Netflix says puts me in just sub-HD quality(in a very peaky [and I believe variable compression], up and down stream). I'm only watching on a 32" TV, but it looks quite good.
Just for yucks I'm trying streaming on my AppleTV-3, plugged into same media bridge as TiVo above, streaming same show, and sweet jesus there is a definite difference in KB/s. I just waited for the entire graph to fill with samples from the ATV streaming, and a weird thing happened, once it pushed the first 5min, or whatever that is, all the way out and was replaced with a fresh 5min, the actual plot of the graph just went away in a poof. However, it did update the trailing average number to reflect over the past 5min (all of which were streaming Netflix to the ATV3, over same 5ghz-N bridge), and it's very odd but the #s were almost double what the TiVo did, same media bridge, same ISP, same network, same show and same time of day.
I ended up getting about
950KB/s which is 7.125Mb/s, on the
ATV-3 which is exactly what Netflix says it requires for SuperHD (which I may or may not be getting, still unclear).
Here's a picture of the corrupted graph, but the average downstream # is still accurate and useful.
I will try more streaming services on more devices tomorrow, FWIW.