< ![CDATA[I asked myself an interesting question today. Exactly how far from the IPTV future are we? At least in respect of what I have said on the subject before.
I have a couple of WiFi Radios which pull audio streams across the Internet, via my up to 5Mbps downstream ADSL service. These are nice devices but they are not ready for ordinary people yet – they are very early adopter as I can confirm today. I was pulling down a 20kbps audio stream from the BBC on the upstairs device and a 128kbps audio stream from an overseas station downstairs. Note the k in the speeds – this is far below my local loop speed, and unfortunately both streams kept going into buffering mode which indicated a very poor delivery service which was not due to their individual sites performance but the performance where they joined to come to me – the local loop from the ISP.
If ADSL through my ISP is not capable of supplying transfer rates sufficient for audio, it is definitely not able to supply the several magnitudes greater requirements of video.
What about QoS I hear you say? Well that only works if the feed is over provisioned to some extent, something that for the audio level rates I had today, I would have normally believed I was. Not true.
So we are a very long way from being ready to deliver Video over Broadband – certainly in a way that non-early adopters would expect.]]>
