Netflix slow on MAC, speedy on Win 7 PC

Question

Hi,
I am trying to get my macbook pro i5 to play streaming netflix.
I used to do it on my win7 HP laptop for some time and it works nice.
on my mac, quality went down, when I tried to figure out why, I found out that the netflix stream is of lower quality.
I used ctrlalt+shifts when in the netflix playback window and see the actual bitrate and what is it buffering into..
on the PC it goes from 500->1500->2600->3800->2600->3800
on the mac it does 500->1000->500->1000->1500->500->1000
they are both connected wirelessly to the same setup:
mac - Airport N (transmit rate 117MB/s)
pc - internal wirelless G 45Mb/s
TP-LINK 1034ND Wireless N router (very strong one) - 3 antenas
Thomson cable modem on a 12Mb/s connection
and two ISP subscriptions were attempted, I also tried each computer connected directly to the cable modem.
still the PC provides me with superior streaming bandwidth. how come mac is having hard time ?

Answer 1

OK,
I did a traceroute on both computers...
the first 9 hops are identical, after that, the windows PC just report the next hops as Request timed out while the mac:
10 77.67.108.34 (77.67.108.34) 167.007 ms 166.900 ms 177.202 ms
11 72.21.220.67 (72.21.220.67) 174.870 ms
72.21.220.71 (72.21.220.71) 166.169 ms
72.21.220.67 (72.21.220.67) 166.046 ms
12 72.21.222.155 (72.21.222.155) 177.455 ms 170.238 ms
72.21.222.145 (72.21.222.145) 165.270 ms
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * *