Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Information infrastructure cost and performance


Whenever I see the bill for Internet access, TV, fixed and mobile phones from my parents in Germany, it drives tears into my eyes as I have to compare it to what we pay in New York. While over here it is practically impossible to pay less than $100/month for net, TV and phone (or just net and phone for that matter), they pay a third of that - and the same is true for wireless phone&data. In addition, network speeds and reliability appear to be better as well, even at lower costs. So I was curious to understand more when Netflix published a recent analysis of network performance for the countries they operate in to provide insights into a real world application: Watch streaming movies.

The original Netflix data highlights how pathetic the performance is in the US compared to nearly every other country served by Netflix, especially when you see a decline while every other country sees an improvement. So even though Germany is not on the list, it certainly proves my perception of having to endure a rather mediocre performance.

So how does it look when you factor price in?

To come up with a comparable graph, I picked a provider from Netflix' detail list for each country. Not the very best one, but from the top 5 and checked their monthly cost for the base package (which for Finland is 100Mbps). Normalize that against US dollars (Jan 14th exchange rates) and plot it against the performance achieved in the most recent Netflix survey (October 2013 data).

Not unexpected, the US is again at the bottom of the pile, and they are by a wide margin. Only Ireland "keeps up", but they had other problems over the past few years, even though their knowledge economy does require better and more cost effective infrastructure if the return to growth should be sustainable. And my Norwegian is not good enough to figure out how much more one might get for the price (which could be significant, as the Energy utility is also the Internet provider).

As an expat I am always amazed what people here keep up with. So I am keen to put some additional light on the stories and perception by adding real live data. This is one. Another will be healthcare in a later post.

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