Fake Bill Gates

People ask what my take is on net neutrality and I keep thinking that net neutrality is basically a guarantee on innovation, for now. The problem is that with the traditional system, the cable company is blasting every single channel into your home, regardless of whether you’re watching it or not. The upside is that changing channels is merely a process of adjusting the frequency the TV listens on, and you get a nearly instantaneous channel change. This is ridiculously wasteful. IPTV saves so much bandwidth by only transferring the data for the channel that you’re tuned into. Even if we used the ridiculously wasteful Blu-ray codec, and the cable industry’s low estimate of coax bandwidth, IPTV could allow you to watch 46 HD channels at once.

I have outlined signals analysis below. The only caveat is that I did not specialize in e-signals, but I took tons of physics and software engineering courses and can set up mythtv with an analog tuner blindfolded, with my hands tied behind my back (okay, maybe not both hands… I still have to type). Please correct me anywhere that I’m wrong.

Data Rates

At 1080x, Blu-ray’s data rate is 54Mbps (~6.75 MBps). Comparatively, HD television providers (namely Verizon and Comcast) regularly transmit 1080x at 10-18 Mbps. Supposedly, Blu-ray sends so much extraneous data for error handling, but something tells me that encryption (which is apparently to protect you from yourself) helps put that overhead up there too.

Coax

Typical coax’s total bandwidth is a total of 672 MHz. The data rate for coax is 6 MHz per 50 Mbps (~6.25 MBps). Slapping down some quick dimensional analysis leaves us with:

672 MHz * 50 Mbps = 5600 Mbps (~700 MBps)

           6 MHz

Now, since IEEE sometimes works in vacuum of theory and formulas that don’t work with such exactitude in the real world, one trade group claims that coax total bandwidth is only 300 MHz. At that rate, we’re still talking 2500 Mbps (~312 MBps, which is pretty close to the new DOCSIS rates). Thus, even if we use Blu-ray’s ridiculously redundant and encrypted codec at 6.75 MBps, and the trade group’s bandwidth estimate (that is half of IEEE’s estimate), you could watch 46 HD channels at once.

To mitigate the channel changing issues, you could easily receive a background signal that transmits a reduced signal resolution which includes every channel. Also, as the new generations grow up where DVRs are standard, live TV will undoubtedly make way for on-demand TV, which dumps channel changing for menus. It will only become further unnecessary to have data constantly blasted into your home that was blasted in just a few hours ago. For example, the Daily Show and Colbert Report are channeled into your home AT LEAST 4 times per day on weekdays. Even then, re-runs and syndication account for a ridiculous portion of data beamed into your home. The result is that you’re “downloading” stuff that you’ve downloaded tens if not hundreds of times. With on-demand TV, loading of data could easily start while on menu screens. Trailers (and beginnings of shows) and video art would quickly be downloaded in the background and then the regular video could be downloaded in real time.

Back to Neutrality

So the moral of the story is that if we require net neutrality, we require innovation, and it’s only a matter of time before we get amazing pipes into our homes that blast ridiculous speeds and tens of concurrent HD signals. Without net neutrality, the incentives are not to make a better system, but to make a system full of more rules and nickel/dime rates.