Advanced Television

AT&T will cap bandwidth

March 15, 2011

Tiered services becomes a reality as AT&T has confirmed it will soon cap its DSL bandwidth at 150 GB per month. Customers who use more data over three months will have to pay $10 for each additional 50 GB slice of data.

This is potentially bad news for services like Netflix. A typical movie streamed in HD will use about 3.5GB for 720p HD and when Netflix moves to 1080p that will more or less double. Nielsen recently estimated the typical customer is streaming around 11 hours of video from Netflix’s website per month. However, Nielsen’s data is based on PC and laptop usage only and doesn’t include any streams accessed via iPads, Roku set-top boxes, Blu-ray players or any of the other 250 devices Netflix’s streaming service is now available on.

Categories: Articles, Broadband