The average speed of streaming on Netflix in South Africa lags behind major developed markets, though the country is almost on par with India and Brazil.

Statistics from the global video-on-demand provider show that the average speed is well behind developed markets such as the UK, the US and Japan, but ahead of developing economies such as El Salvadore and Venezuela.

South Africa averaged 2.54Mbit/s, compared to 3.73Mbit/s in the US and 3.69Mbit/s in the UK. India recorded 2.62Mbit/s, while Venezuela managed just 1.31Mbit/s. The average in Brazil was 2.69Mbit/s.

Netflix has also updated the rankings of the Internet service providers that offer the fastest average speeds. In South Africa in November, Cool Ideas topped the list at an average 3.7Mbit/s, with Vox Telecom and Vodacom tied for second place at 3.21Mbit/s. MTN and Cell C rounded out the top five.

The ISP rankings do not include streaming to mobile devices, rather measuring fibre, ADSL, satellite and fixed-wireless connections. See the table below for the full ranking.

The Netflix ISP Speed Index lists the average prime-time bitrate for Netflix content streamed to members during a particular month.

“For ‘prime time’, we calculate the average bit rate of Netflix content in megabits per second streamed by Netflix members per ISP,” the company explained.

“We measure the speed via all available end-user devices. For a small number of devices, we cannot calculate the exact bit rates and streaming via cellular networks is exempted from our measurements.”