Netflix recently posted its Internet Service Provider (ISP) index for March 2016, a monthly update on the international status of the ISPs providing the best -and worst – prime-time video streaming experience.

As has been previously reported by The Costa Rica Star, the main ISP firms in our country such as ICE’s Kolbi Hogar have long scraped the bottom of the Netflix list, and the March 2016 report is not an exception in this regard.

Back in December 2014, Netflix announced the deployment of a new strategy to improve streaming experience. The effort is called complexity-based encoding, and it allows us Netflix to boost streaming performance of TV shows and movies while using less bandwidth.

The complexity-based encoding seems to be improving the Netflix experience in major markets such as the United States; for example, with the new encodes, the first episode of House of Cards Season 4 streamed 720p starting at 910 Kilobits per second (Kbps) and 1080p starting at 1620 Kbps on TVs; previously the lowest bit rates for those same streams were 2350 Kbps and 4300 Kbps, respectively.

Although the strategy has helped subscribers in Costa Rica to some extent, our country is still, on average, the slowest streaming nation tracked by Netflix. The only highlight of the March 2016 report is that one U.S.-based ISP, CenturyLink, posted an average speed of 1.53 Mbps, which is lower than the 1.87 Mbps national average in Costa Rica.

The all-time leader in streaming speed tracked by Netflix is The Kingdom of the Netherlands, followed by European nations such as Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and others. New Zealand is another speedy Netflix nation, and the same goes for many Asian countries, which are way faster than the Americas.

According to the Netflix March 2016 report, the best ISP in Costa Rica for streaming video is Telecable with speeds of 2.30 Mbps, followed by Tigo Star with 2.17 Mbps. By comparison, Kolbi serves just 1.5 Mbps.