Quote:
Originally Posted by zamler
I reiterate, why offer blazing fast speeds if you can't use it? All it ends up being is pure marketing BS.
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Data usage and data throughput are two totally unrelated concepts in this discussion, and should not be linked.
If I offered you a plan that provided 1 terabyte usage per month, and provisioned a line that could deliver that amount of data every month, you'd have 3 megabit DSL. 1 terabyte in 1 month works out to almost exactly 3 megabits per second.
A 3 megabit connection can't do HD streaming on demand, has relatively high latency that makes it unsuitable for gaming, video conferencing, or even VOIP.
You need the "blazing fast speeds" for the same reason you need more than the 40 HP it takes to maintain highway cruising speed in your car - there are times when you have multiple streams going at once, or have near-realtime demands like VOIP, live streaming, latency sensitive gaming, etc. You need that extra headroom to get acceptable performance during the peak times.
So it's not marketing BS.
In effect, with Shaw's move, what you are seeing is the pendulum swinging more towards throughput, and away from capacity. Shaw has consistently been raising their minimum performance levels for the price (look at what 15 megabits costs today, compared to 7 megabits a year ago), at the expense of raw monthly capacity, which obviously hasn't kept pace with the raw performance of the connection.
What they are trying to do is find the happy medium between three divergent points - how much people will pay, how much throughput they need on average for today's uses, and how much capacity they need on average per month.
Fast, lots, or cheap.
Pick any two. That's what Shaw is struggling to do as well. They can't deliver on all three, for all customers. There's not enough money or infrastructure in the country to do that.
People can spin it as a Shaw vs. Netflix thing all they want, but I think the truth behind what is happening is considerably more complex that that.