US Cable Support > Comcast HSI > Holy cow, Netflix really does use a lot of bandwidth ...

Holy cow, Netflix really does use a lot of bandwidth ...

Enjoy it while you can. I'm sure before long Comcast will implement caps on the buisness side as well. However I expect the way they would do is charger different rates for different caps and or overages.
--
»www.crucialcolin.com/ | »www.pcgeektech.com

reply to pandora
Hmm, let's see:

1 GB per hour
250 GB limit

You'd need to watch 250 hours of HD content per month, or over 8 hours per day. That's a lot for one person. Now I could see a family of 4, each watching an HD stream, but that's still basically a full length HD movie PER person PER day.

BTW, 1 GB/hr amounts to about 280 KB/s (~2.2 Mbit/s), so even 4 simultaneous streams is quite doable on even the 12 Mbit tier.

You're doing 11 GB/day which is 11 hours of HD programming. Wow! How many folks are in your household watching this stuff?

While the majority of people aren't going to come close to the cap, Comcast really should account for people with multiple bandwidth consumers in a household and at least provide a way for these customers using their service legitimately to make things right, instead of just cutting them off!
--
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." -Ferris

Comcast is also in the content business.

It is beneficial for the content side of Comcast if the ISP side of Comcast makes it difficult to stream from other content providers.

One hand washes the other, so to speak.

reply to pflog

There is no way Netflix is 13.68 GB per hour. That's 30 Mbps and more like bluray quality.

I don't use netflix so I have no idea how much it really uses/etc, but I do know that nearly 14 GB per hour is definitely not what netflix is streaming their HD content at.
--
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." -Ferris

reply to pandora
Pandora - I think you may be mixing bits/sec and bytes/sec. That would account for a 8x difference.

reply to pandora
I ran Netflix Roku box all night ( I couldn't sleep), I use at most about 3 gigs (Edit: a movie, sorry) and thats streaming all HD content. I watch about 4 HD quality movies. This how much I used so far of the 250 gig limit, and this is from surfing the net, down loading two games from Steam, and streaming Netflix movies.

April 2010 Data Usage Included Used Remaining
17%
As of 4/16/2010* 250GB 44GB 206GB

reply to pandora
My roku has hdmi output.
mine is the HD model I think they do make an sd model as well.

I talked to roku about carrying HULU but that said at this time the techs can't comment.

I guess its a licensing thing..I wish they had it.

reply to pandora
Here is some info on the different brands of Roku boxes.

»www.roku.com/roku-products

reply to sparks
My firewall takes an hourly snapshot of the inbound and outbound traffic to the cable modem. Here are a few hours of numbers, starting a little before I started to watch a Netflix HD movie, and ending a little after I finished watching the movie.

The columns are: Date Time Download Upload

12/07/2009 15:00    5,430,794,664       504,929,727
12/07/2009 16:00    5,434,347,962       510,692,464
12/07/2009 17:00    5,436,632,721       514,622,370
12/07/2009 18:00    5,522,585,157       517,434,426
12/07/2009 19:00    6,316,647,324       531,545,176
12/07/2009 20:00    8,180,218,568       558,908,736
12/07/2009 21:00    8,781,637,312       570,042,021
12/07/2009 22:00    8,787,641,690       572,039,505
12/07/2009 23:00    8,788,692,706       573,176,777

btw, the movie ran for about one hour and 40 minutes....

reply to pandora
Nice to see actual numbers on this, I wouldn't be that much surprised to see the cap lowered or prices increased more than just the $2/mo increase coming (residential only). From everything I've been reading Cable TV subscribers are going down at a fairly steep rate, at the same time Internet subscribers are increasing. The more you use the more you are going to pay, it's just best for the investors.

Not to mention the fact that landlines are dying, more and more people are going to wireless only or cheaper voip (cheaper than CC). I feel like HSI will become the cash cow in the business.

HSI is already the cash cow of the biz.

reply to pandora
There's a couple different ways you can get Netflix streams actually. Anything from Silverlight servers (Xbox, etc.) in my experience is super compressed (and looks like it) and consumes relatively little. Stuff on a set top Netflix 2.0 platform tends to eat as much as it can get its hands on, adaptive streaming-style. I have seen people on a 1.5Mbps DSL connection fail to stream SD content under these platforms due to constant buffering, but the Windows clients work fine (SIlverlight). I think I have clocked up to about 1.4GB/hr on a 2.0 stream to a set top.

reply to pandora
I have 6 computers in the house, 1 xbox, 1 xbox360, 1 PS3, 2 Ipod touches, 1 PDA. I have Netflix and frequent HD videos and SD content. We have 5 ppl in the house. I just don't see using 250 GB. We average about 60 at most per month. Just saying... I could see if you can go over the 250 gb limit... but I know our family would have to try very hard... and me and my brother game over 15+ hours a week. As well as consume other content. I frequently download images and have my own hyper-v server... etc etc... its just seems hard... However I do use my works internet connection frequently for image downloads as well... sooo...

Yea, I know when I was watching LOST on Netflix and I was watching 7-8 hours a day... trying to catch up for the next season I was getting a good 10-15 GB consumption per day. Like I said I can see how its possible but you would really have to try is all I'm saying.