Netflix Bandwidth
A random thought experiment that just popped into my head: what's the bandwidth of my Netflix "connection"?
Let's assume that Netflix mails me 3 DVDs per week, each of which is just a plain old single-sided single-layer disc with a movie on it. The bandwidth should be:
The result surprised me: the bandwidth is 187 kbps! It's also sustained, full-duplex, and at 100% utilization (assuming I watch all the way through all the movies). The "download" speed is comparable to a low-end ISDN connection in the US. Switching to HD-DVD Blu-Ray would increase the bandwidth to 992 kbps, in which case the "upload" speed would actually be higher than my upload speed on my Comcast connection.
Of course, with an average latency of 2.3 days (201600000 ms), it would be pretty much impossible to run a protocol like TCP on it (unless the timeouts were really, really high). Just to begin downloading a simple HTML page would probably take several weeks, due to the SYN/ACK handshaking of the DNS and HTTP transactions..
Update 3/18: Fixed math error. Thanks Simon!
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April 18th, 2008 - 11:09
I heard a story once where a company offering mine tours priced up various connections (wired/wireless ethernet) to transmit guest photos from the mine to the base and eventually decided upon carrier pigeons because they were cheaper and offered higher bandwidth. They were also upgradeable, since they could strap larger capacity memory cards to them as they became available.
However, they began to experience packet loss when a hawk showed up…
April 18th, 2008 - 11:18
PS. You made a mistake in your calculation 🙂
Looks like you read the final bitrate of 0.1865 million bits per second incorrectly as 0.8865.
April 18th, 2008 - 12:39
Doh! I should have double-checked the math. Now the result is not as surprising.. Nice catch 🙂
April 28th, 2008 - 06:13
You used to blog here…
April 30th, 2008 - 22:55
Yeah yeah, I made a new post 🙂
May 22nd, 2008 - 02:08
Nice analysis…I did some related analysis regarding the Roku box yesterday, you might find that interesting.
http://multicodecjukebox.blogspot.com/