dslreports logo
 
    All Forums Hot Topics Gallery
spc
uniqs
32
88615298 (banned)
join:2004-07-28
West Tenness

88615298 (banned) to IPPlanMan

Member

to IPPlanMan

Re: Been saying this for years now...

said by IPPlanMan:

If this is indeed true, then I've been right about what I've said for years: Faster speeds results in higher levels of usage.

Sorry but Netflix HD streams stream at 5 Mbps whether you on a 15 Mbps connection to 300 Mbps conenction.

Streetlight
join:2005-11-07
Colorado Springs, CO

Streetlight

Member

said by 88615298:

said by IPPlanMan:

If this is indeed true, then I've been right about what I've said for years: Faster speeds results in higher levels of usage.

Sorry but Netflix HD streams stream at 5 Mbps whether you on a 15 Mbps connection to 300 Mbps conenction.

You're right that for some situations like a single Netflix stream of an HD video at 5 Mb/s regardless of a speed tier fast enough to support it. The problem for many is that a single stream is not always the case. For many, mom and dad may be looking at a Netflix HD streaming video, one of the teenage children may be listening to Rdio at 250 Kb/s while doing homework using a computer, another teen watching another HD movie stream while surfing the net on an iPad, all the while the computers in the house backing up their hard drives to Dropbox. Additional users in the household use even more Mb/s. If this kind of activity goes on every day, the household's data use can easily saturate a 15 Mb/s pipe and fill a 300 GB bucket in a lot fewer than 30 days.

Internet for Comcast is a cash cow. It's been reported that the cost of bits is pennies per giga byte. It's not clear to me what the cost per subscriber is for infrastructure, but I doubt it's more than $10 per month. The price we pay for bits is awfully high.

On the other hand, for cable TV it seems the cost of programming is controlled by the content producers. Ala carte TV might be nice. For example since a small minority of folks would choose the Disney/ESPN/ABC giant, the subscription cost of it might become unsustainable considering those who now subsidize it would be gone. Disney would have to change their business model and professional athletes and their masters might have to take a major income drop. The same with all those niche channels no one watches. They'd have to go away. Subscription fees could drop precipitously and maybe sanity would come to the cost of cable entertainment.