Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Typical Comcast User Consumes 2 Gbytes to 4 Gbytes a Month

The typical Comcast residential broadband user consumes 2 Gbytes to 4 GBytes of bandwidth per month.

So the reason ISPs are worried about the impact of increased online video consumption is that that level of usage is roughly equivalent to two or three or iTunes-sized movies per month, some argue.

A widespread shift to significant movie viewing online would disrupt usage patterns fairly quickly.

It isn't a customer's problem to figure out how the additional network capacity is added. That is the ISP's problem.

But if video has the potential to suddenly increase network demand, it could affect user experience even for users who don't watch video, since most of the ISP's facilities are shared.

One shouldn't expect any user to be happy about costs that roughly reflect usage, whether the product is water, electricity, gas or Internet access. But neither should any user suspect that any provider can, over the long term, simply ignore the impact of higher demand.

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