Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Warner Backs Blu-ray, Tilting DVD Battle

[Jack Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

1 MB/sec is not unreasonable for Internet connections in many places.
That is an 8 Mbps connection. Many cable operators have at least 4-6
Mbps connections, with several offering 10-15 Mbps packages. In
Columbia, Medicaom offers 8 Mbps and 10 Mbps packages. I have the 8 mbps
one and I pretty reliably get downloads of nearly 1 MB/sec. DSL is
lagging behind somewhat, with speeds more in the 1.5-5 Mbps range, but
they seem to be improving, especially in areas with a cable company
offering much higher speeds than the telco's DSL. There is also
fiber-optic Internet, but that is not very widespread.

The only guys who are really left out are the ones outside of cable
service areas. Occasionally DSL can be run out of town at
rapidly-decreasing transfer rates as distance increases from the CO,
with the minimum rate generally being 384-512 kbps or so. The other
options are satellite, which is very expensive, has transfer speeds of
somewhere around 200-500 Kbps, and uses a modem for uploads. Not to
mention Hughes, which does much of the satellite Internet, has draconian
usage restrictions. Last time I checked, there was a 165 MB per every 12
hours limit. The other way is POTS, which I had to use for a number of
years as I lived two miles out of town (no cable) and about 800 yards
too far from the telco's CO to get DSL. It flat-out sucks, and add to
that the pain in the butt winmodems and that's a recipe for shelling out
for a fractional T1 or something else like that just to get a reasonable
connection. Something like cellular modems or WiMax may be the ticket
for more rural areas rather than satellite due to much lower cost of
entry. Shooting a satellite into the sky is much more expensive than
putting up a handful of radio towers. 

--Jack

On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 11:18 -0600, Mike Miller wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Jan 2008, Vern Green wrote:
> 
> > A radio program I was listening to the other day was saying that the 
> > decision between Blu Ray and HD DVD is likely to be a moot decision 
> > anyway. They were saying that more and more people are going to be able 
> > to have HD movies on demand and people will be able to download the 
> > titles they want.
> >
> > Certainly there is already movement in this area though it will likely 
> > be some time before it replaces the drive formats.
> 
> 
> One HD movie takes up something like 20 GB.  I wouldn't want to have to 
> download that.  Even at 1 MB/s, which is unrealistically fast for an 
> internet connection, it would take about 5.5 hours to download one movie. 
> Maybe they have faster ways of moving data using satellite dishes or 
> somesuch.
> 
> Mike
> 
> _______________________________________________
> discussion mailing list
> EMAIL:PROTECTED
> http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion


_______________________________________________
discussion mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion