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One Reason of Many Why Bandwidth Caps Suck

According to MLB.com, the highest quality HD streams on MLB.tv run at 3Mb/sec. So let's do some math.

3 Mb/sec * 3600 sec/hr * 3 hr appx game legnth = 32400 Mb/game

32400 Mb/game / 1024 mb/gb / 8 bits/byte = 3.95 GB/game

Jetbroadband's* fastest, highest-cap plan has a bandwidth cap of 100GB. Something is very wrong here.

I understand that ISPs don't want people downloading hundreds of gigabytes of torrents every month, but this is a perfectly legitimate and legal use of my bandwidth. I must just be a fringe case at this point, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when the collision hits for mainstream internet users between their bandwidth needs for always-improving online video and their bandwidth restrictions put in place by always-evil ISPs.

* Yes, I switched back to Jetbroadband recently after suffering one too many outages at the hands of NRV Unwired. While their speeds are still erratic at best, they seem to have fixed their system to only dip down as low as ~1.5Mb/sec during peak hours instead of being consistently below 56k, where it was a year ago. Just FYI for anyone else in Christiansburg.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on April 18, 2009 8:41 PM.

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