Pulaski

There's lies, dämned lies and statistics! ..... It is said that 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US, so assuming that very few live close to the Alaskan border, that leaves approximately 31million Canadians living in 4,000x100 sq miles, or about 79/sqmile. In fact almost two thirds of Canadians live in Ontario and Quebec, and almost half the remainder in British Columbia.

Likewise Australia where the population is almost entirely confined to the coast, and mostly to the coast of the south east corner, with a pocket in the west around Perth.

So the reality is quite different from the raw numbers. I agree that in the US, Canada and Australia the population densities are lower, but most European countries don't have the vast empty spaces that the US, Canada and Australia have.

kodokan

We've been playing a game with Cablecom (Edit: sorry, Cox - Cablecom was a different country) for a couple of years now for internet (we don't have TV). They sell 4 or 5 different levels of internet speed - note it's completely sold on speed, and any notion of a data cap is waaaaaaay way down in teeny tiny small print. We read stuff carefully, and didn't even realise there WAS a cap until we started getting emails about 'ahem... just letting you know it's only Day 20, and you've already hit your data 'limit' for the month... you might want to dial it down a little...'.

The emails then become increasingly terse over the next 6 months, then hubby goes into a Cablecom store and agrees to step up to the next speed tier, in exchange for getting it half price for 6 months. Rinse and repeat. We're on the penultimate tier at the moment at a reduced rate; at some point we'll end up on their Super Shiny Premier Top package, but may as well delay it as long as possible.

Funstuie

They are going to love me. I have a nas setup which auto downloads all the TV shows we watch (mostly US based sitcoms), movies and music. Right now I download around 1tb per month on average.

kodokan

We're at about 500-600 GB, I think. Most of it is a Netflix/ Youtube-watching preteen, and a gaming teen. I figure at some point the pricing model will change, and we'll end up paying more for the Netflix/ Amazon Prime feed which we have in place of TV, but perhaps that'll be once the kids have left home and our usage would drop hugely anyway.

kimilseung

I am on Comcast and they had a 250 monthly cap, which I usually keep within, but for the last year or so, they are not enforcing the cap while they experiment with pricing policies in some markets (x dollars per gig over the monthly limit) The last month or so I have been about 500 gig.

scrubbedexpat091

We have to limit our netflix use, our monthly cap is 125gb per month, 55 per month, if we have to we can go up to 250gb for 5 more per month, anything above that and the internet is just as pricey as cable, so may as well have cable.

kodokan

We don't get charged for going over the cap - at the moment... - just get a series of polite-neutral-terse emails about it! Our cap is for 300gb, for $75 a month (although we're currently paying $67 as per hubby asking for a reduced rate every time we jump up a tier).

scrubbedexpat091

They seem to only go after super high users who sign up for the low tier plans, such as 250gb but signed up for 125gb and never staying under 125.

The other tiers climb high in price so people don't want to pay 120+ a month for the higher cap plans.

Michael

I suspect in the future, IPTV will replace cable TV and as that happens, internet connection costs will rise with even more restrictive caps.

SAT will probably have a major problem since what would they use those satellites for?

steveq

Isn't there a protocol which broadcasts packets rather than serves them ?

Nutek

When we move house, our intention is to not have cable TV and to spend the money we save from that on a business class Internet connection.

Slightly lower speed (100Mbps instead of 150), but no monthly caps and a couple of fixed public I/Ps will see us more or less break even with what we are paying now once we factor in Netflix, Prime and decent VPN / DNS subscriptions.

Michael

IP multicast is a technique for one-to-many communication over an IP infrastructure in a network. The destination nodes send join and leave messages, for example in the case of Internet television when the user changes TV channel. IP multicast scales to a larger receiver population by not requiring prior knowledge of who or how many receivers there are. Multicast uses network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers only when necessary.

The most common transport layer protocol to use multicast addressing is User Datagram Protocol (UDP). By its nature, UDP is not reliable—messages may be lost or delivered out of order. Reliable multicast protocols such as Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) have been developed to add loss detection and retransmission on top of IP multicast.

IP multicast is widely deployed in enterprises, commercial stock exchanges, and multimedia content delivery networks. A common enterprise use of IP multicast is for IPTV applications such as distance learning and televised company meetings.

As of 2006, most effort at scaling multicast up to large networks have concentrated on the simpler case of single-source multicast, which seems to be more computationally tractable.

Still, the large state requirements in routers make applications using a large number of trees unable to work while using IP multicast. Take presence information as an example where each person needs to keep at least one tree of its subscribers, if not several. No mechanism has yet been demonstrated that would allow the IP multicast model to scale to millions of senders and millions of multicast groups and, thus, it is not yet possible to make fully general multicast applications practical. For these reasons, and also reasons of economics, IP multicast is not, in general, used in commercial Internet backbones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

Nutek

We use Multicast when we reimage our computer labs.

Michael

That's a small network compared to the internet and if you don't have multiple networks, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

steveq

Fascinating stuff Michael, thanks for posting it. I seem to remember multicasting was being touted years ago, your link explains why it hasn't expanded.