Comparison For Broadband Internet Service and HDTV - By: Paddy Chang

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Telephone, Internet, and TV service are now routinely bundled by service providers. It is convenient to have a single supplier and one bill a month. With the availability of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), the lines between the different services have blurred further.

Broadband Internet service (High Speed) for residential or small business requirements has usually been available from two sources: DSL, a system that piggybacked on the telephone wiring from the telephone company, or Cable, a system that similarly piggybacked on the cable TV wiring. In 2008, about 25 million customers utilized cable broadband, and about 22 million customers utilized DSL. In 2001, a total of about 5 million customers used either cable broadband or DSL.

For most people the TV coaxial cable has offered better performance than DSL, but if you were highly price conscious, then the DSL cable may have been competitive. So, in a discussion of broadband choices, we should include cable and DSL, but we will also discuss new options that are now available like WildBlue satellite, and services that will soon be available like WiMax (WiFi with a city-wide hot-spot) and ViaSat (satellite communications on steroids).

The Impact of Video Downloads (especially HDTV):

Despite the relatively small number of users, research indicates that systems such as BitTorrent and YouTube account for more than half of all Internet traffic. In 1995 the total amount of data transacted over the Internet backbone was about 1.5 million GB. By 2006, this had grown to over 700 million GB.

ABI Research projects that the number of video downloads to increase from 215 million downloads this year (2008) to 2.4 billion downloads in 2012. This number becomes more impressive when one takes into account that a much higher per cent of those downloads in 2012 will be HDTV files, which are much larger (A non HDTV movie is approximately 3 GB/Hour, HDTV file size is dependent on encoding: an MPEG-4 encoded HDTV movie file size is approximately 5 GB/Hour, an unencoded 1280 X 720 movie file size is over 150 GB/Hour, and an unencoded 1920 X 1080 movie file size is over 350 GB/Hour).

By 2010, forecasts call for 80-90% of Internet traffic to be video transfer.

Cable and the Phone Companies (DSL):

Cable broadband is capable of about 30 MBPS of bandwidth, however, speed can vary. Unfortunately, the measurement in real-world conditions can be more complicated. If many people in your neighborhood use the same broadband service as you, and those people use a lot of bandwidth, for video downloads for example, then you will be sharing some resources, and your performance will suffer. Most service providers offer service with between 3-6 MBPS bandwidth for downloads. Upload bandwidth is lower: usually between 200-600 KBPS.

Median DSL speed in the U.S. is 768 KBPS. One type of DSL technology, VDSL, is capable of 30 MBPS bandwidth, but this service is not widely available. Instead, telephone companies more commonly offer ADSL or SDSL services (cheaper and slower).

Both Cable Broadband and DSL service providers commonly employ bandwidth caps for residential and small business customers. Service providers concerned about the overall capability of their network may institute the capacity constraints so that they can provide equal performance to all of their customers.

Cable and the Phone Companies HDTV:

Verizon is building fiber-optic networks that will be capable of broadcasting handle 200+ HDTV channels in addition to all of the conventional TV channels.

Most cable operators have enough available bandwidth for only about 10-12 HDTV channels without a major retooling of their networks.

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