Dominic Brown
Lantern Staff
How would you feel if you were limited on your home data as opposed to your phone? Well as of Monday, Feb. 20, a majority of internet service providers also known as I.S.P., have imposed data limits in Kansas. Cox, AT&T and Comcast three of the largest I.S.P.’s have enacted a one terabyte data limit to home Wi-Fi use because of the ever increasing usages of broadband and home data usage.
Nowadays with the popularity of online gaming, streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and the ever increasing audience of video sites like YouTube, a greater strain has been placed on I.S.P.’s broadband capabilities. Some individuals have voiced concern for the limit, seeing it as more pointless restrictions to either pull in more money or to have a greater control.
“It’s dumb, and we shouldn’t have to fork out extra for a service we already pay for,” sophomore Konner Zimmerman said.
Despite a terabyte being a huge quantity of data, some people are still afraid of going over the limit and being charged for overage. But have no fear, because here’s the math. Using streaming on Netflix or gaming online as a control, you have two options standard streaming 720p at about a gig per hour or high definition streaming in 1080p at three gigs an hour. If you are limited to 1tb per month with 30 days in that month, you would have 33 hours’ worth of streaming for the day. So you could either be held to 33 hours of streaming a day on standard definition, or 11 hours of streaming on high definition. With the average person active throughout the day for about 15-16 hours there’s no way you would be able to fit in even 11 hours of high definition streaming between eating, taking a shower, going to work/ school or driving from place to place.
According to Cox, to burn through your data, you would have to: watch 140 two-hour HD movies, watch 300 half-hour standard definition TV shows, watch 1,500 three-minute videos, like on YouTube, surf the web for 3,000 hours and listen to 30,000 songs that are four minutes long each.
While it’s unfortunate that a limit has been placed, it’s something that has to be done. Increasing demands on I.S.P. networks need some way to regulate the titanic levels of traffic. Despite the new limit, there will be no shortage to your “Netflix and chill”.
