I don't get this... Lowering the quality of the stream isn't the answer... that's why we pay for faster service, so we can use that speed... using Netflix's general guidelines for streaming video at it's highest we're only using 10-15% of our allotted bandwidth... and we're already being conditioned to think that is too much... If you're going to keep us under a cap, at least make it realistic to the speeds we're paying for... I'm not paying for 50 Mb/s and then being swindled into lowering the quality of my stream, thus negating the entire reason I would pay for the extra bandwidth in the first place... When I got my first T-1 line installed nobody told me how much data I could push or which data was more important... I paid for the bandwidth and I got the bandwidth I paid for...
So, with Netflix, while you can stream at internet speeds of 1 Mb/s, the quality will be grainy on your big screen TV — as if you were watching a VHS movie.
After scouring the Netflix website, I found this from Steve Swasey, Vice President of Communications for Netflix.
As a guideline, Swasey suggested the following minimum internet speeds for Netflix:
1 Mb/s for viewing on a laptop computer (SD, 4:3 aspect, poor audio)
2 Mb/s for viewing standard definition video on a TV (SD, 480p, but blotchy and still poor audio)
4 Mb/s for viewing High Definition video (HD, 720p, with Stereo or compressed Digital Audio)
5 Mb/s or more for the best audio and video experience (HD, 1080p, Digial Audio)
9+ MB/s or more for anything HDX, 3D, or 4k...
I'm going to run with the 300GB advertised cap I'm seeing for the 50/10 plan... and assume the average movie is 100 mins (just trying to round, but movies generally run 90-120 mins)...
Don't forget that the GB which usually stands for Gigabyte can have different meanings in different contexts. The GB could be Gigabyte, or Gibibyte... and while Gibibyte is starting to be reffered to as GiB, in most cases currently that line is still unclear... (It's the reason why that shiny new 500 GB hard drive only reports being 465.66 GB, it's actually 465.66 GiB... GiB is more commonly used for storage, while GB is used for data per second)
So, at the lowest possible rate, 1 Mb/s, a single film would take up approx 750 MB of your 300 GB cap, it's about 445 movies at 100 mins a pop, meaning you could feasibly just stream video at that rate for approx 31 days before running out of data... You wouldn't WANT to watch it, but you COULD... and if you did, all you would need is a halfway decent DSL line...
Moving on to the worst case scenario (In the eyes of the people capping our legal data use) - 1080p, with Digital Audio (still not the highest quality you can stream, but completely adequate... After all it's the same as the new digital OTA broadcasts... at that rate each flick would use approx 3.75 GB of data bringing the total number of films you could watch down to 80 before hitting your cap... that's a 365 movie difference... or 27 days less...
(For the math geeks - 1 GB = 109 B = 1,000,000,000 B, and 1 GiB = 230 B = 1,073,741,824 B)
Sure, somewhere just over 72 hours of movies SOUNDS like a lot, but what about all that other data you're bouncing around out there... after all you're only using 5 Mb/s of your 50 Mb/s speed... aka 10% of what you're paying for... and they're asking you to slow it down... if we were actually to use the full bandwidth we're paying for, we'd go over the 300 GB cap by about 458% every month (or about 1.374 Terabytes)... and that's not going over 50 Mb/s...
I know it's not all that black and white... Cox (and just about every other ISP) as the "Acceptable Use" policy... but at this point that seems less like trying to control traffic, than like trying to lessen existing traffic so that lines and servers will have to be upgraded less frequently... The original intent of the "Fair Use" rule was to stop illegal activities, not make me watch The Avengers in poor quality on my 50" TV...