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While I trust your experience with regard to whatever specific streaming assumptions & goals your project was seeking, in fact my DSL, maxing at 5Mbps in speed

by gojomo 12y ago

While I trust your experience with regard to whatever specific streaming assumptions & goals your project was seeking, in fact my DSL, maxing at 5Mbps in speed tests, has no problem streaming HD from Netflix for a sharp picture on a 50" TV. (A sibling commenter links to Vudu's FAQ that reports 2.25Mbps as their threshold for HD streaming.) And we're not limited to streaming: at 5Mbps, iTunes HD downloads complete faster than they can be watched, and at 4Mbps you just need to give them a 10-minute head-start per hour. So no-one at 4Mbps – the floor at which ~90% of America already has 2 or more wired providers and 2 or more wireless providers – need be locked out of their inalienable human right to video-entertainment. At most they might need to wait a few minutes... or watch in the SD that was good enough for decades of TV-watchers. Wireless is not yet a perfect substitute for cable/DSL, but it's an acceptable substitute for many people, when they're not heavy audio/video consumers. My wireless service (TMobile LTE) is about 4x faster at my home than my DSL wired service – and so I've switched to wireless on occasion when I needed large software downloads to complete quickly.

nknighthb 12y ago
You are fortunate to live somewhere with high-quality DSL, and not have anyone else using your connection. These things do not hold true for the majority of people. I expect you're also tolerating much longer startup times than most consumers tolerate. Vudu is not providing meaningful HD. The way you get 2.25mbps "HD" is by providing a 720p or 1080p stream of very low quality. 2.25mbps is not capable of providing even close to HD quality without going to h.265, which is not currently practical. Your premise was that 4mbps was "plenty" for HD. To now speak of SD is simply admitting that you are wrong, and 4mbps is not meaningfully broadband. I also have T-Mobile LTE. It's almost useless without putting the phone in the window, has massive latency spikes, and can't maintain high speeds for long without dropping out completely. It is of no practical use in replacing the connection I do actual work on.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  As another data point on your behalf, Netflix won't even serve 720p unless you have 5mbps service; https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
- gojomo 12y ago
  Netflix HD streams start in about 5 seconds. If you can download 1 hour of HD in 1 hour and 10 minutes over 4Mbps, that is still "plenty" in my book – especially since 90% of the USA have multiple options for that bandwidth. If one provider is out front with more bandwidth for impatient cinemaphiles – good for them! Let them charge more, in more ways, as a motivation for competitors to upgrade. The ability to satisfy all other net uses – web, email, short videos, software downloads, audio streaming, video conferencing, etc – from multiple competing providers almost everywhere is still pretty good. Saying that's "not broadband" is arbitrarily raising the standard to create a false sense of crisis. It's too bad your LTE needs a careful window positioning; I've noticed mine faces many weak spots around the neighborhood. But wireless is competitive in many places, for many people, for many uses – and keeps getting better. No one is trapped indefinitely with bad service needing federal rescue – the rates and options have been improving non-stop for decades, based on raw competitive factors.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    5 seconds is beyond the tolerance point for most consumers. 3 seconds is getting into annoyance territory. You're mostly OK below 2. Your argument is now circular. 90% of the US is fine because they have at least 4mbps, which is fine because 90% of the US has it. That doesn't work. In fact, I can turn it right around on you, as Wheeler recently did -- "When 80 percent of Americans can access 25-3, that's a standard.". You have cinemaphiles exactly backwards. They are more tolerant of delays and long downloads than ordinary consumers, because they understand and expect that they will have to put up with such for maximum quality. Ordinary consumers want something that works like a TV channel or a website. Raising the threshold for internet service to be classified as an advanced telecommunication capability is not a "federal rescue", it's the FCC doing what it's mandated by 47 USC § 1302[0] to do -- report on the availability of advanced communications capability, defined as "high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.". You should also read the actual report[1], where they discuss exactly why the new level was chosen. Hint: They recognize households consist of more than one person. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1302 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1302 [1] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0224/FCC-15-10A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015...

by gojomo 12y ago

nknighthb 12y ago

You are fortunate to live somewhere with high-quality DSL, and not have anyone else using your connection. These things do not hold true for the majority of people. I expect you're also tolerating much longer startup times than most consumers tolerate. Vudu is not providing meaningful HD. The way you get 2.25mbps "HD" is by providing a 720p or 1080p stream of very low quality. 2.25mbps is not capable of providing even close to HD quality without going to h.265, which is not currently practical. Your premise was that 4mbps was "plenty" for HD. To now speak of SD is simply admitting that you are wrong, and 4mbps is not meaningfully broadband. I also have T-Mobile LTE. It's almost useless without putting the phone in the window, has massive latency spikes, and can't maintain high speeds for long without dropping out completely. It is of no practical use in replacing the connection I do actual work on.

mikeyouse 12y ago
As another data point on your behalf, Netflix won't even serve 720p unless you have 5mbps service; https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
gojomo 12y ago
Netflix HD streams start in about 5 seconds. If you can download 1 hour of HD in 1 hour and 10 minutes over 4Mbps, that is still "plenty" in my book – especially since 90% of the USA have multiple options for that bandwidth. If one provider is out front with more bandwidth for impatient cinemaphiles – good for them! Let them charge more, in more ways, as a motivation for competitors to upgrade. The ability to satisfy all other net uses – web, email, short videos, software downloads, audio streaming, video conferencing, etc – from multiple competing providers almost everywhere is still pretty good. Saying that's "not broadband" is arbitrarily raising the standard to create a false sense of crisis. It's too bad your LTE needs a careful window positioning; I've noticed mine faces many weak spots around the neighborhood. But wireless is competitive in many places, for many people, for many uses – and keeps getting better. No one is trapped indefinitely with bad service needing federal rescue – the rates and options have been improving non-stop for decades, based on raw competitive factors.
- nknighthb 12y ago
  5 seconds is beyond the tolerance point for most consumers. 3 seconds is getting into annoyance territory. You're mostly OK below 2. Your argument is now circular. 90% of the US is fine because they have at least 4mbps, which is fine because 90% of the US has it. That doesn't work. In fact, I can turn it right around on you, as Wheeler recently did -- "When 80 percent of Americans can access 25-3, that's a standard.". You have cinemaphiles exactly backwards. They are more tolerant of delays and long downloads than ordinary consumers, because they understand and expect that they will have to put up with such for maximum quality. Ordinary consumers want something that works like a TV channel or a website. Raising the threshold for internet service to be classified as an advanced telecommunication capability is not a "federal rescue", it's the FCC doing what it's mandated by 47 USC § 1302[0] to do -- report on the availability of advanced communications capability, defined as "high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.". You should also read the actual report[1], where they discuss exactly why the new level was chosen. Hint: They recognize households consist of more than one person. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1302 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1302 [1] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0224/FCC-15-10A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015...