said by espaeth:1) The traffic is all downstream where capacity is greater (45mbps vs 9mbps)
2) The traffic is all in a single TCP session.
Internet radio is 128-192kbps. *yawn*
and unicast Internet video in its current form will never be able to scale large enough to matter. (There's not enough capacity at the content source for it to deliver anything other than niche content to a subset of standard TV viewers)
High definition video (HD-DVD / BluRay) did ~$250 million in sales last year. Next gen HD discs only comprise about 0.5% of the disc rental market, with DVD being the other 99.5%.
Internet video did ~$134 million. It's not a big enough chunk of users to worry about; the content providers will have scaling issues far before it becomes a problem for ISPs.
You are assuming that everyone runs BitTorrent full-on. That's nice for your argument, as it is the most egregious p2p offender and the main talking point of your industry's assault on non-captive media, but does not address streaming media's continuous usage profile (both up and down, by the way, since it's not confined to just Shoutcast and many folks originate). I still assert that this is just a test and if Comcast can get their current "network management" procedures past the regulators it will be a very short walk to interference with other, less shady services. Like Netflix, Amazon and now Apple iTunes video downloading and streaming.
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