Monty Solomon posted:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/charter-data-use-rising-rapidly-as-cord-cutters-average-400gb-a-month/
This sounds like scolding people who only use Internet streaming for TV,
because they require more Internet capacity than the luddites. How valid or
relevant is this idea? The main take-away:
"The demand for both speed and throughput on our network continues to
increase," Charter CEO Tom Rutledge told investors in an earnings call
yesterday. "Monthly data usage by our residential Internet customers is rising
rapidly and monthly median data usage is over 200GB per customer. When you look
at average monthly usage for customers that don't subscribe to our traditional
video product, usage climbs to over 400GB per month, which compares to an
average mobile usage of well under 10GB a month."
(Parenthetically, not at all surprising that mobile usage is much lower. A few
years back, the hype was that much or most of TV was going to be viewed on
smartphones. Never sounded credible. And the above stat should also suggest how
much of the mobile 5G hype makes any sense?)
So, in spite of the ambiguity, comparing median with mean, the message is that
streaming-only customers use more Internet capacity than the average Internet
user, at Charter. Average 400 GB/mo for streamers-only, median in excess of 200
GB/mo overall. However, not mentioned, these streamers-only customers don't use
any of the legacy MVPD bandwidth. In terms of the PONs distributed throughout
neighborhoods, this legacy TV bandwidth is likely the vast majority of PON
bandwith. Wait! I can already hear the knee-jerk reactions:
Sure, much of the legacy TV service bandwidth is used by broadcast streams,
which won't demand a lot of two-way packet switching service through the ISP
network, nor edge server capacity. But what about the on-demand service used by
legacy MVPD subscribers? That does require edge servers and unicast streams.
Whatever scheme is used for that, it could instead go to supplement the
Internet capacity of the system. For several years now, the majority of all TV
watching is NOT linear/live. It is on demand. So my guess is, legacy MVPD users
are using up a substantial amount of system capacity which could go to Internet
use, including in-system DVR capacity. Use of home PVRs, last I've seen
reported, is on the decline.
In short, what people SHOULD be wondering is, what fraction of Charter's system
capacity, overall, is still dedicated to legacy MVPD service? The reality is,
IP is becoming, or has already become, the preferred protocol for all sorts of
services. Should be no surprise that TV viewing is included. It will make more
sense, over time, to give Internet service top billing. People are cutting the
cord for various reasons, and those reasons are not going away.
Bert
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