Obama’s Speech: A Bandwidth Hog?
Barack Obama’s speech at the convention is available for download from the official convention site in what they term to be “high definition” video. And admittedly the video quality (making no value judgements about the rhetorical content) looks fantastic. But how much bandwidth is it taking up if someone were to watch Obama’s speech speech from last night – or John McCain’s speech next week.
We know that streaming video can cause extra traffic on the network – but exactly how much extra traffic? We downloaded “FreeMeter,” a utility with monitors bandwidth usage, turned off all our incoming and outgoing programs and launched the Democratic Convention Web site where you can watch the speech in high definition. The video, which is 54 minutes long, takes 1.11 gigabytes to download.
We’ll also look at the size of John McCain’s speech next week.
Which brings us to our next topic:
Wired: Comcast to make monthly Internet use cap official
Comcast has long been criticized for its unstated bandwidth caps – including by this blog. Getting hit by the FCC for the BitTorrent blocking might have affected the company, because for the first time Comcast has put a number on the cap:
On Oct. 1, the cable company will update its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of traffic per month, the company announced on its Web site.
Comcast has already reserved the right to cut off subscribers who use too much bandwidth each month, without specifying exactly what constitutes excessive use.
Bandwidth caps are poor ideas, as we mentioned previously, but at least this is more honest than cutting customers off who reach an unstated, unacknowledged limit.
Texas Tech Pulse: Interview: NetQOS Eyes IPO, Maybe
Texas Tech Pulse interviews the handsome, brilliant, witty, dashing, extraordinary, Steve “Danger” Harriman, VP of Marketing at NetQoS. [Full Disclosure: Steve Harriman is my boss’s boss.]
It’s regarding our press release of our earnings reports for Q1 and Q2 2008 revenues - typically not something that a private company put out, which fueled rumors that we were planning to go public. (To make it clear, however: NetQoS has made no announcements or filing to go public.)
Steve Harriman: We're now getting to a critical mass. If you want to do projections from the revenues that we announced this week, typically, Q3 and Q4 are even stronger than in the first half of the year. So our $60 million target for this year is certainly attainable.
As a company reaches that size, it's certainly no longer in the startup category. We're at that size where we have to consider future options. We have no current plans and nothing underway, but you start to think about the possibility of a public offering. Today's economic climate is not particularly conducive, but, obviously, a public offering is something that takes a lot of planning and preparation. We are very much in that phase.
