India has not always been the best country to watch Netflix in. Slow internet speeds and poor peering with the rest of the world meant that even in households with theoretically good broadband connections, streams on the service would start out at a low video quality, before slowly improving in a few minutes. But soon after the company launched its service in India in 2017, it got to work implementing Open Connect, an unusual way of delivering its content to end users — among other things, Open Connect involves having compact caches of storage media with Netflix content ready to go, embedded directly inside individual Internet Service Providers' networks. These efforts paid off — over the next couple years, most major ISPs started serving Netflix as well as theoretically possible, while other streaming services were largely at the mercy of the Content Delivery Network with which they partnered. This led to some unusual outcomes — for a while, a small Mumbai ISP named 7 Star Digital was crowned as the best ISP to stream Netflix on, as its user base was relatively small, and it had some Open Connect caches installed in its network. India jumps up in the Netflix ISP Speed Index Netflix's ISP Speed Index reflected the frustrating conditions that shaped streaming in India — in 2019, India didn't figure in the top countries for which the index published measurements. But the situation was improving — the ISPs Netflix partnered with tended to offer a decent experience for content…
