[RTC List] Broadband speeds and stability for streaming video?

[William Van Hefner]

David,

The first thing you should do is call Suddenlink and schedule an
appointment for someone to come out and test your connection. Most online
"speed tests" are pretty unreliable. Suddenlink should be able to tell
pretty quickly where the problem is.

That being the case, I'm pretty sure that most cable modem and DSL
customers in the area get well over 1 MBps downstream. I know that
Sonic.Net advertises a bonded DSL service here that goes up to 20MBps
downstream. My ADSL line at home feeds my DirecTV receiver/DVR for viewing
their HDTV Video On Demand service, and it regularly sucks bandwidth at a
rate of 3MBps for hours at a time. It can burst well over that though.

BTW, most streaming video services do not actually show movies in "real
time". They generally buffer the video on the receiving device for at
least a few seconds. That way, a temporary loss of signal won't lead to an
interruption in the picture. For movies, the delay wouldn't really be
noticeable. It's a different story when it comes to things like news and
sports though. Nobody wants to be 5 seconds behind everyone else that is
watching the Superbowl.




-- 
William Van Hefner - President
Vantek Communications, Inc.
e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com


On Wed, January 28, 2009 2:10 pm, Dave Thewlis wrote:
> We have started to look at the Roku Netflix box, which is a streaming
> video gadget to connect internet directly to a TV.  Roku say they need a
> minimum of 1.2 Megabyes/second to provide a decent quality picture.
>
> Has anyone experimented with one of these things?  My current Suddenlink
> download speed is 953 Kilobytes/Second and 64 Kilobytes/second upload. This
> is a a lot below their stated average of 6 Megabytes/second download and
> 512 Kilobytes/second upload.  It may be a fixable problem
> but other statements on this list suggest that SL customers in our area get
> significantly slower speeds than advertised, so I'm wondering if streaming
> video is practical for this area.  Or possibly DSL is better? I can't get
> DSL here so cannot do a comparison.
>
>
> What about 101NetLink?
>
>
> Dave Thewlis
>
>
> --
> *Dave Thewlis, DCTA Inc.*
> +1 707 840 9391 (voice) · +1 707 498 2238 (mobile)
> http://www.dcta.com · dthewlis at dcta.com <mailto:dthewlis at dcta.com>
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