[PLUG-TALK] Throttling a PTP feed - "TV" bw

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 12:47:46AM -0800, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> If someone wants to watch streamed TV all day, eat bonbons and
> get diabetes, that is sad, but not many will be able to do that
> with the throttled 3mbps I'm providing now.  

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 03:08:27AM -0800, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
> While on DSL I checked the bandwidth consumption of a Netflix
> stream.  It was a consistant 1.5mbps.
> 
> They do auto scale to whatever is available. Or at least try to.

Indeed - but at some point the video addicts will look for a more
reliable fix.  One addict may be able to get by using my pipe,
two will contend if their shared pipe is close to saturated. 
When I wasn't limiting the feed, they were grabbing much of the
15mbps I have coming in, surprising given the limits of 802.11b

If you measure 1.5mbps per channel, and the autoscaling is
granular, then I will throttle to 2.8mbps instead of 3mbps,
supporting only one feed reliably.  Somewhere I was reading 
that the granularity of netflix was 2.0mbps and 4.0mbps, no
steps in between, but your empirical measurement trumps 
whatever I was reading.  I just want to make sure there is
a largish chunk of bandwidth available that multiple netflix
feeds cannot completely absorb.

One worry is that the addicts at the other end are students
whose parents are trying to curb their television overuse.  
The students could be using their computers, intended for
schoolwork, to bypass parental limits.  But parental limits
are no substitute for parental engagement - if mommy and 
daddy are too busy watching TV themselves to help Buddy
and Sis with their homework, then their genes deserve to
terminate in their underemployed, unmate-able kids.
  
Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com