U.S.: $2000 to watch Breaking Bad with LTE

clohamon

Illustrative experiment carried out by Consumerist

Comcast Says Mobile Data Is Competitive, But It Costs $2k To Stream Breaking Bad Over LTE

Here’s how we did our math:
There are 62 episodes of Breaking Bad.
Each episode is about 45 minutes long, so the series runs 46.5 hours total.
According to Netflix, each hour of HD streaming TV uses about 3 GB of data.
The entire series run of Breaking Bad uses about 139.5 GB of data from start to finish.

Our math says that trying to use your mobile data the same way you use your home wi-fi will cost you about twenty times more per month than your wired broadband bill. You’d have to be Walter White to be able to afford to watch all of Breaking Bad over your wireless network.

watty

Mobile data is a loss leader. It's subsidised by Voice and SMS.
The only way to watch HD video on Wireless economically semi-mobile is DTT, Satellite is cheapest for Broadcast but even more expensive than Mobile for unicast data.

DTT is actually far cheaper than fibre Internet for HD video, if you only watch scheduled video. But if everyone is watching different video, but only 10% of time a Broadcast TV is on, then fibre Internet is cheaper.

Have more than one TV in the house? Broadcast is no extra cost if you have 100 TVs.

Broadcast on DTT, Cable and Satellite suit different environments and use. Cable is Pay TV only. Broadcast is complementary to Internet Unicast.

Mobile isn't suited to a static activity like a full length video. It's designed and costed for bursty intermittent traffic. It won't ever be a substitute for Fixed Broadband. Everyone really needs Fixed Broadband AND Mobile AND Broadcast (Radio and TV). You need all three. They are complementary.

The Cush

The EBU say "Mass linear TV content via cellular networks is too expensive"

Too costly and not spectrum efficient

The major conclusion of the article is that, at least for today’s cellular network infrastructure, and even with new state-of-the-art mobile technology, it is not reasonable to use cellular networks for the provision of linear TV content over large areas for reasons of cost and of spectrum resource usage.

To achieve a significantly better spectrum usage, for cellular networks with nation- or region-wide coverage, much higher base station densities would be needed; such base station densities would currently be available only in metropolitan areas. The costs of very dense cellular networks which have significantly lower spectrum consumption are by a factor of 25 to 30 higher than the costs of present broadcast networks.

EBU publishes study on the delivery of broadcast content over LTE networks - https://tech.ebu.ch/news/ebu-publishes-study-on-the-delivery-of-b-31jul14

watty

Some sanity prevails.