Snail Mail Still Winning The Bandwidth War

LR_none writes "Today's New York Times has this short piece suggesting snail mail is the leading broadband technology, at least for video movies on demand. The article states that the 8 to 9 gigs of data on a DVD would take two weeks to download at 56kb, making Netflix' three-day distribution by mail seem speedy. (Since they can send three or more movies at once, Netflix compares favorably with DSL download speeds, too.) The author estimates Netflix alone distributes 1,500 terabytes a day, which is impressive considering the Internet carries 2,000TB a day (by estimates cited in the article). The 'immediate gratification' aspect of Internet consumerism has given a huge boost to companies like FedEx and UPS, but it's surprising to think of the post office as being the leading infrastructure provider for digital entertainment, in terms of market share and efficiency, for the forseeable future. (Disclaimer: I don't work for Netflix or the post office.)"

Comments

Significant fact to rebut MPAA claims . . .

[werdna]

The MPAA claims that the internet has creates significant consequences and risks -- citing to supposedly a kazillion feature films being pirated daily. This simple piece of arithmetic is a useful hunk of rebuttal.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Snail Mail...

[isa-kuruption]

High throughput... high latency :(

Re:1,500TB? Doubt it.

[GMontag451]

Maybe Netflix distributes 1,500TB a day of movies, but that's using DVD's MPEG-2 compression. Encode 'em with DivX and you're gonna slash that figure by what... 80-90%?

And you will suffer the loss of quality and the inability to play them on a real TV that goes along with it, no thanks. DivX sucks.

Bandwidth per day

[freakinPsycho]

I'm suprised no one has looked at the 2000 terrabytes/day number.

I'm sorry, that seems just a bit low. 1 site pushing 1 Gb/s is 84 Terrabytes/day. That means only 23 sites have to use that much bandwitch for that 2000 number to be hit. As I know of at least one site that pushes (not counting incoming) 10 Gb/s, that number is just a little unreasonable.

I'd really like to know where people get these kinds of numbers. I have seen silly numbers like this one and the 7 billion pieces of e-mail per day numbers and have to wonder where they come from. Acording to some numbers I saw released at one point, Hotmail alone receives over 1 billion e-mail per day.

I really have to wonder if someone is just making this stuff up or if they are looking at a very small set of data and extrapolating from there. In either case, I think better methods need to be used to create these kinds of numbers.