DOJ and Comast its not quite what you might think…

Just a short clip this time.  First of all I am working on getting the 3 mini podcasts up on the website as well as the first full episode.  I’m seriously debating breaking it in to two parts.  it ended up being nearly 2 hours long (in fact I believe its something along the lines of 2 seconds short) at the current moment.  That seems a tad long for me for a podcast… but let me know what you think.

In other news it appears that the DOJ (Department of Justice) might be turning its mighty eye towards  our ISPs.  It appears that according to this article on Engadget that they are possibly looking at the legality of data caps, as well as some other things.  Hopefully this will help bring the data caps to a more livable and realistic level.

As I’ve mentioned in the past families are growing… in fact kids are moving back in with parents thanks to our economy.  Imagine if you can 4 adults in a house all of whom want to watch Netflix, stream to their phones and use the internet for games, entertainment, and work.  The 300 GB data cap that Comcast has expanded to (or is expanding from 250 GB) only gives each person 75 GB.  Sure that’s quite a bit of information… until you break down your entertainment.

Purely for example if you loved movies and watched Netflix constantly in HD you can do some simple math to come up with the number of movies.  A standard DVD can hold a maximum of approximately 700 MB of data, or 300 less then 1 GB.  So if you watched nothing but standard movies, and watched shorter ones, lets say 500 MB. of data usage.  That’s 150 movies per 75 GB of Data.  Not bad right?

Just wait what happens when you switch that to HD.  A Blue Ray disk holds 25 to 50 GB of data (as per blu-ray.com).  Different sites have different information on streaming but the general consensus is between 1 and 2 GB per hour, with most movies averaging between 1.5 to 2 hours.  This math tells us that your looking at between (we’ll ignore illegal disk downloads), 1.5 GB to 4 GB as your average data per movie.  We’ll simplify this some and go in-between the two and say 2.5 GB per movie assuming you might rewind to watch a really interesting part, searching for the movie, etc.

At 2.5 GB per movie, this means that doing NOTHING ELSE, you can watch 30 movies total.  That’s one movie per day, with no other data used.  Yes 30 movies is a lot, but that’s assuming that you say, don’t buy a game from Steam or Xbox Market Place, or that you don’t download a lot of pictures from a site, using your smart phone with your home network, playing Diablo 3 or watching Twitch.tv, or anything else for that matter.

Oh yeah, that’s also not counting upload.  Remember data doesn’t just come from your computer… everything we do online also has an upload cost as well, so that 30 movies… probably closer to 20 or 25 at most.  As you can see data is very quickly eaten up.  An extended play session of an MMO RPG can eat up data depending on the programs you run with it (voice chat programs for example).  I certainly hope that we se Justice done here when we haven’t seen it down in the past when looking at big oil…