BC Business
Here are the top 10 ISPs in Canada (of 18 in total).
Bad news for Telus customers: your Netflix may be the slowest in Canada, at least compared with other major Internet service providers (ISPs). Netflix’s newly released report compares average speeds for 18 different ISPs of all sizes from across the country—and Telus came in 10th.
While that many only sound mediocre, it’s a poor performance among the major players: Bell’s fiber optic network is first, Shaw snatched fourth, Rogers is seventh (a notable improvement considering a May report revealed it was the previous laggard) and Vancouver-based Telus is 10th, with an average speed of 2.89 Mbps. By comparison, Shaw, the other major player in B.C., averaged 3.13 Mbps. In other words, Telus customers may be watching slower, more pixelated episodes of House of Cards.
That said, while comparatively worse, the speed itself is not bad. When Rogers ranked last, it was clocking in at 1.67 Mbps, a truly noticeable difference. But as tech journalist Peter Nowak writes, it’s clear from the most recent numbers that Rogers “has lived up to its promise” to dramatically improve performance. Meaning, these test results really do matter, functioning as an effective way to force Canadian ISPs to compete with one another to avoid being caught in last place, where Telus more or less finds itself now.
Clarification: An earlier verison of this story said that Telus ranked last among all major ISPs in Canada. While this may be true, the report separates Bell’s fiber optic network from its DSL one, which is considerably slower; Telus, on the other hand, has its fiber optic and DSL networks grouped and ranked together, making it unclear which ISP is slower overall. Certainly, Telus’s Netflix speeds are slower than those of Rogers and Shaw.