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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it a bit disingenuous to suppose that we don't know exactly what those 2% are doing?

Just because people are downloading a ton of illegal content right now doesn't mean 5 years from now the average person won't be downloading it legally. This is how progress is made.

It's funny, that's exactly what people said about binaries on Usenet.

Are you suggesting that average bandwidth usage isn't going to increase?

Caps will move, rates will move, usage will move, prices will move. I'm not sure what your point is. I'm saying (or, strongly implying) that virtually the only people who will be hit with this cap today are the ones using BitTorrent.

And websites like http://www.graboid.com repackaged usenet to make is accessible to the general population. Movie studios don't seem to mind since they have a DMCA process and most content never gets one.

And Usenet died. But sure. Graboid. Whatever that is. Yay!

Nowadays, a significant portion of those "bandwidth abusers" are people who are just watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. The use of Netflix instant streaming has grown tremendously over the past year, and for many people, it's become the exclusive source for non-live video content.

To bust a 250GB cap with NetFlix, you have to watch 250 hours of exclusively HD content; 8 full hours a day, every day, nonstop.

To be honest, in a family of four or larger, that's not entirely impossible to achieve as family members' individual usages add up.

You're also leaving out what the household might be doing with its Internet besides Netflix, and you are conveniently ignoring the 150GB cap on DSL service.

Why are you defending AT&T for lowering its level of service by an order of magnitude and imposing gigantic overage fees?

I did some quick math. I could go over this cap on my DSL line simply by using my connection at full speed for LESS than a tenth of a month; i.e., less than 2.4 hrs per day. Sorry, that's not acceptable on an "unlimited" link.

Thanks, I wasn't aware that their HD bandwidth requirements were as modest as 2.6-3.8 Mb/s, from both a more effective codec and limiting fidelity to 720p30 stereo.

http://blog.netflix.com/2008/11/encoding-for-streaming.html

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