For the past several months, people have been arguing over bandwidth, caps, speed, and other aspects of Internet service. According to Charlie Demerjian, the cable companies could really care less about the bandwidth, or the Internet portion of their service in general. It’s all simply put there to protect a dying medium. I highly recommend looking through his article here. In short, cable companies don’t really get affected by people using a lot of bandwidth. What they do care about however, is their dying television medium that is going to eventually lose out to the Internet. Here is a quick passage explaining the loigc, but I really suggest reding the entire thing.
“Again, so why the fuss? Think about this, a Blu-Ray movie data stream can take up to 54Mbps. A decent 1080p picture can be done with half that, call it 25Mbps, and if you compress it to awfulness like the cable companies are so fond of doing, you can probably get away with 10Mbps before people drop your service for quality reasons.
For the sake of argument, I will be using 10Mbps as the floor for HD digital video in the future. See the problem with usage quotas now? If you have a piss-poor HD video playing, you will eat up your bandwidth cap in about 2.5 hours of TV watching a day. According to the latest numbers I can find, Nielsen says that Americans watch on average about 142.5 hours a month with teens shifting a lot of that online.”
