[Nanog] ATT VP: Internet to hit capacity by 2010

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Mon Apr 21 19:43:14 UTC 2008


Once upon a time, Steve Gibbard <scg at gibbard.org> said:
> iTunes video, which looks perfectly acceptable on my old NTSC TV, is .75 
> gigabytes per viewable hour.  I think HDTV is somewhere around 8 megabits 
> per second (if I'm remembering correctly; I may be wrong about that), 
> which would translate to one megabyte per second, or 3.6 gigabytes per 
> hour.

You're a little low.  ATSC (the over-the-air digital broadcast format)
is 19 megabits per second or 8.55 gigabytes per hour.  My TiVo probably
records 12-20 hours per day (I don't watch all that of course), often
using two tuners (so up to 38 megabits per second).  That's not all HD
today of course, but the percentage that is HD is going up.

1.1 terabytes of ATSC-level HD would be a little over 4 hours a day.  If
you have a family with multiple TVs, that's easy to hit.

That also assumes that we get 40-60 megabit connections (2-3 ATSC format
channels) that can sustain that level of traffic to the household with
widespread deployment in 2 years and that the "average" household hooks
it up to their TVs.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.




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