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Originally Posted by pl001
Just to clarify, QoS does not mean you are gauranteed a certain level of service. It merely gaurantees a higher level of service for prioritized packets than for non-prioritized packets.
You are correct that QoS and throttling are not the same. But the net effect to the consumer can be.
The article you posted was interesting, showing that up to 1/3 of traffic comes from Netflix. It would appear that congestion is going to be an even bigger issue as online streaming continues to increase in popularity.
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Usage expands to fill capacity, that seems to be a basic law. I would expect that capacity will expand even more to meet increasing usage. As long as companies can make money in the game, they will continue to play. It really wasn't all that long ago that we didn't have broadband and people used 1200 baud modems to access the internet, and 10 mbps ethernet at the office was hot stuff. That's how cyber Monday came about. I'm sure that other backbone companies will step in to expand the over all backbone capacity. The various end user companies (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc...) will need to continue to beef up their capacity as well.
The big issue for streamers is content. People love Netflix because what's not to love about all you can eat streaming for $10 a month. Netflix is now between a rock and a hard place because they have established $10 a month all you can eat, yet they have a lot of expenses. They need to get content, and they need to expand their capacity. At some point, I expect it to settle in, somewhat like music has, between people who want to buy/rent and people who just want a subscription service.
To tie things back to Apple, Apple's big problem is content. If Apple every really comes out with a iTV product (ignoring the current AppleTV, which is really a different product), I expect them to compete more with TiVo than with Netflix, i.e. a place where the end user can say "I want to watch Black Sails" and not worry about where it comes from.