Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees → IPtV

its going to limit the expansion of IPTV dramatically. Comcast doesn't want the competition of DirecTV's on demand system or IPTV. Think if a user watched 15 HD movies per month. I'm not sure how large each file is to download to the STB but I would imagine they would be in the many gigs for a 2 hour movie.

Hi-Def movies are around 20GB each. Now I'm sure you can compress them, but you'll be losing quality.

Yes, you could hose a 250 cap pretty ez.

Imagine VOD or live streaming. Yeah, Video can eat bandwidth....

Anti-Net Neutrality through capping. Perfect isn't it?

Capping and throttling is also Eco-Friendly and Green because we are saving 1000s of barrels of Oil and greenhouse gases by putting off DOCSIS 3 and backbone upgrades by using existing equipment longer and putting a longer lifespan into existing equipment and delaying the manufacture of upgrade parts (line cards/CMTSes/routers) until greener technologies exist in the future and delaying the release of emissions during equipment manufacturing.

Compression doesn't necessarily mean losing quality, if it's done proper. What I mean by "proper" - is that it has to be compressed enough, but not more, so that your perception of the compressed versus the original (uncompressed) image is identical.

If the difference in quality is detectable when compression is turned up and people complain, then one of two things will happen:

1. the provider will decrease the compression, increase quality, use extra bandwidth to accomplish this and/or eventually upgrade infrastructure so they can sustain higher quality with lower compression

2. the provider will not decrease signal compression, leave quality as is, and tell you to pipe it until they eventually upgrade infrastructure so they can sustain higher quality with lower compression

And it's your choice how you will vote with your wallet for either one of these outcomes, or create a new outcome, unrelated to these two.

This illustrates the basic problem - the people who have a monopoly on selling you the pipe to get data into your house also sell the product coming in on the pipe....

Comcast sells TV programming, the internet offers competition. Comcast, as the seller of the data pipeline into your house, reserves a fixed part of the bandwidth for its product while restricting the remaining part of the pipe to dissuade you from using the internet competition.

There are two fair solutions - split Comcast into 2 companies, one providing content (TV bandwidth) and one providing internet bandwidth or else get rid of digital TV entirely and let it all come in over IP (equivalently, charge the bandwidth used by your TV-watching hours against your internet cap).

By not counting comcast-VOIP and digital-TV bandwidth against your internet limit, Comcast is in the perverse position of claiming that its business is driven by the notion that there are 3 distinct signals using bandwidth, which cannot be considered the same. That could turn out to be a problem, since Cisco holds a patent on that concept, meaning Comcast's entire business model is based on a patent infringement.