Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
With internet it's not scaleable to the mass market without servers at the ISP.
Also the percentage of internet used for ebooks is tiny. It can be over half for streaming TV.
The Cable company in many areas is the only viable broadband. Mobile, even 5G, can't replace fibre, dsl and cable for broadband and even less so for streaming video for a mass market. Basic physics.
The cable companies just won't be selling premium broadcast channels.
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Netflix does (some) ISP servers with the bigger ISPs like Comcast but most other streamers don't.
It still works fine.
The Cablecos' internet monopoly isn't long for this world.
The satellite constellations can reach everyone everywhere and the new land-based wireless networks are "leveling up". They definitely can serve mass markets in cities with the milimeter wave segment of 5G.
Cable won't vanish but they'll be constrained from raising prices by competitors. The telcos are investing billions to go after that specific market.
It'll take a couple of years but STARLINK, for one will start signing up customers late this year. It's too bad the OneWeb went bankrupt over the crisis but Project Kuiper has Amazon money to work with so they'll hang around.
Edit: The Netflix edge servers don't exist because of capacity issues but because years ago Comcast discovered 60% of their evening taffic was Netflix and they tried to shake them down by threatening to throtle Netflix traffic so, rather than pay blackmail, Netflix installed the edge servers. Which they now use mostly to serve different national audiences. They help feed different content to different regions to protect against cyber attacks and accidental shutdowns but they're not mandatory. With modern streaming protocols bandwidth requirements are much lower.
Plus in the US there is still tons of excess backbone capacity in the form of "dark fiber" owned by independent companies who lease it out as required. During the current lockdown streaming demand is up by 40% with nary a glitch. And there's still plenty of headroom left.
Throttling these days is a no-no because net neutrality has become a major political issue.
And Comcast itself is a streamer now so throttling a competitor's traffic would be an invitation to the DOJ to take them to court.
Streaming is just getting started.