Cable Forum - View Single Post - Virgin's 50Mb broadband arriving December 15?

qasdfdsaq · 07-12-2008, 18:06

You'll see at the beginning of my post that I am emphasising HD, I don't use iPlayer (which suppodly only accounts for 1.2% of online video anyway, I was only using it as an example), but that will be coming to HD soon as well. Based on my current experiences the bandwidth use is around 4-6mbps, which makes 1.8-2.7 gigs an hour. That matches well with iPlayer HD's expected usage, which is around 4 meg. A good quality broadcast stream takes over 10mbps. Again I'm assuming I won't be the only person using the line so even if I'm only hitting 2 gigs the other 7 people in the flat combined will inevitably tip us over the 3 GB threshold anyway. And my point again, two people want to watch TV (iplayer or otherwise) for an hour? Throttle. Once throttled only one person can stream at any sane quality without being impacted by anyone else doing literally anything on the connection. So again, with VOD expanding so quickly, in a shared household the current 20 meg service is actually quite limiting.

Some interesting related info:

"Unless I misunderstood his remarks during the Q&A panel later, I believe he said we should see some HD content on the iPlayer "this side of Christmas," probably encoded at around 4Mbps."

"The BBC is starting [an SDTV] trial of 1.5Mbps H.264 on the iPlayer to Virgin Media's 10,000 50Mbps trial customers in Ashford, Kent."

"The BBC's view is that the minimum threshold bitrate for HD is >3Mbps (though it's interesting to note that their "true" broadcast HD content goes out at 16Mbps or higher)"

Virgin Media themselves admit that IPTV is now "driving network bandwidth" as a whole, and certainly everyone in my household uses it. When we can. If we're not throttled... 50 meg can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

07-12-2008, 18:06	#73
qasdfdsaq Spray and Pray Join Date: Aug 2004 Posts: 2,886	Re: Virgin's 50Mb broadband arriving December 15? You'll see at the beginning of my post that I am emphasising HD, I don't use iPlayer (which suppodly only accounts for 1.2% of online video anyway, I was only using it as an example), but that will be coming to HD soon as well. Based on my current experiences the bandwidth use is around 4-6mbps, which makes 1.8-2.7 gigs an hour. That matches well with iPlayer HD's expected usage, which is around 4 meg. A good quality broadcast stream takes over 10mbps. Again I'm assuming I won't be the only person using the line so even if I'm only hitting 2 gigs the other 7 people in the flat combined will inevitably tip us over the 3 GB threshold anyway. And my point again, two people want to watch TV (iplayer or otherwise) for an hour? Throttle. Once throttled only one person can stream at any sane quality without being impacted by anyone else doing literally anything on the connection. So again, with VOD expanding so quickly, in a shared household the current 20 meg service is actually quite limiting. Some interesting related info: "Unless I misunderstood his remarks during the Q&A panel later, I believe he said we should see some HD content on the iPlayer "this side of Christmas," probably encoded at around 4Mbps." "The BBC is starting [an SDTV] trial of 1.5Mbps H.264 on the iPlayer to Virgin Media's 10,000 50Mbps trial customers in Ashford, Kent." "The BBC's view is that the minimum threshold bitrate for HD is >3Mbps (though it's interesting to note that their "true" broadcast HD content goes out at 16Mbps or higher)" Virgin Media themselves admit that IPTV is now "driving network bandwidth" as a whole, and certainly everyone in my household uses it. When we can. If we're not throttled... 50 meg can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.