Cogeco Drops Metered Billing On Users → Re: Personally...

Really?? Lets see, 4GB per movie on average gives a family around 25 movies per month not including anything else they might want to download. So a family that likes to watch different movies at the same time, like to play online games which require large downloads at times, and do web browsing and maybe upload pictures of the family to a web site should be on a business class account or they are just pirates stealing from others.

I like your thoughts. NOT! Maybe you should go to work for these crooked companies. I am sure they would love to have you.

Then when there numbers go down so much between disconnects and non payments for over usage they will FIRE HIS ASS and say we made a mistake.

Streams from Netflix et. al. are NOT 4GB of data. Even in HD.

4GB is what you get after you rip a DVD, with all it's extraneous "extras" that don't contribute to the movie itself. And if the stream contains that data, it's grossly misconfigured.

More than 100GB, even in a "busy household", has a lot of piracy involved. Don't kid yourself.

What family watches 25 movies a month!!! Even if netflix streams ran that high (which they dont), that is still a riduculous amount of movies. I dont even think 25 movies come out every month, and if youre watching repeats, might as well invest in a 40$ DVD player.

They are pretty darn close at 3 gigs in HD format. Around 2 gigs for standard definition. »Netflix: $.05 to Deliver Movie Stream? .

4 GB? SD is closer to 2 GB and HD is closer to 6 GB. 25 movies in a month at $4-$6 a movie = LOTS OF CASH TO BURN.

But 2GB-3GB != 4GB. There is a difference. Using the example, that makes 50 movies a month that you can watch. Being that Netflix barely has that many movies, that's re-watching the same thing over again.

People keep quoting that 4GB like it's divinely guaranteed or something. And people keep quoting that adding a bandwidth cap is in order to kill the online streaming competition. All this means is that content providers need to be more selective about what they stream and how they stream it. Do you REALLY need a 2Mbps stream of a movie, sucking down 2GB of data? There are codecs that reduce the size considerably, look at the DiVX rips of DVDs clocking in at only 600MB or so. Yeah, it might not be "perfect" but what can you expect from a stream? You would think the content providers would appreciate the added revenue stream, while forcing people who want to get a "good" copy to buy the DVD or Blu-Ray disk.

We got into this metered bandwidth stuff precisely because people were getting stupid with it. I remember when the first hints of Comcast booting people for bandwidth stuff, one guy was complaining because they booted him. Turned out he was slurping down four or five audio streams, 24x7, sucking down almost 500GB a month. And, to add to that, he was not even listening to the stream, he was just recording it and storing it.

South Park had it right, over-logging is going to cause problems. No more mindlessly surfing while watching TV. And limit your pr0n consumption to twice a day, tops.