re: Would you support Trump ending Net-Neutrality?

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If you really want to get pissed about it then look into the amount of "data" the cable company uses themselves.

I haven't looked at it in a while but last I checked the cable companies use the mpeg2 format for the info they send to your box. MPEG2 is yesteryear's tech; it is the stuff that DVDs use and its compression ration is atrocious when compared to the two/three generations that have been developed since it first came about.

Cox, for example, is pushing up to 6 HD video streams to one box - record 6 programs at once - and I could in theory be doing that 24/7. That amount of video is potentially 60 GB per hour = well over a 1.2 TB each day = 36 TB each month. Yet Cox limits me to only 1 TB data usage per month.

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While I think net neutrality is supremely important, you're taking the wrong angle here because your understanding is off. The first error is they aren't just pushing 6 HD streams at once, they are pushing ALL the channels down the line at ALL TIMES (cable works this way, but at&t uverse doesn't). So multiply your figures by about 50 to see a more accurate representation of cable TV "bandwidth". But this should not be compared to your internet speed, and it's not something to be angry about, because these channels are broadcast. Think about it... what is the total transmission capacity of a broadcast over-the-air TV tower? Well, if you're multiplying by the number of receivers, then it's practically unlimited. Cable TV is the same way, every channel is broadcast to everyone, so the total bandwidth requirement is whatever the max channels is (let's call it 500 in HD). And this total does not increase with more subscribers. Internet bandwidth requirements, however, do increase with subscriber count. The required bandwidth scales linearly with the number of subscribers, since everyone is streaming something different.

So, while it might seem like the cable company wastes a ton of bandwith by putting 500 channels on the line at once, keep in mind that their infrastructure just needs to handle those 500 channels at once even with a million subscribers. For streaming TV, to handle a million subscribers their infrastructure would need to handle a million channels at once. Quite a difference.


All that said, it is still insanely cheap for the cable company to provide internet service, and their markups are ludicrous especially given the limitations that are becoming more common.