Comcast and Netflix may hate each other, but they nonetheless work really well together: Netflix’s newly released ISP speed index shows that the average streaming speeds of its customers over Comcast’s network continued to increase in April, with streams now averaging 2.77 Mbps.
That’s a massive improvement over the kind of Netflix speeds Comcast subscribers had to endure earlier this year. In January, network performance fell to an all-time low, with streaming speeds averaging 1.51 Mbps.
Netflix struck a paid peering agreement with Comcast in February, agreeing to pay the service provider to directly connect with its network. The deal was a departure for Netflix, which previously struck a number of agreements with ISPs to place its own caching equipment within their networks.
While the partnership with Comcast may have resulted in significant improvements for Netflix subscribers who access the service via Comcast, it didn’t exactly help to improve relations between the two companies. Netflix went on to complain that Comcast abused its market power to demand payments for something that should be free, while Comcast accused Netflix of willfully slowing down its own subscribers.
Netflix also struck a paid peering deal with Verizon at the end of April, but it may take some time before we see similar improvements for Verizon’s customers.
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