Sonic.net

Some talk of cord-cutting in the house. However, we get 7Mbps at best. Will that work reliably? Has anyone tried?

No more than two concurrent streams. No need for HD as our television gear is rather stone-age.

If it makes any difference, this is in Santa Clara, CA (Bay Area for those SoCal people tempted to think Santa Clarita)

My house has been almost exclusively netflix for several years now. We had two concurrent streams on 3mbps service. Obviously, we didn't use HD either. It worked well enough as we've never been the type to expect completely perfect video quality(we accepted lower bitrates and the blockiness that it brings). With our recent upgrade to Fusion FTTN we're now at a solid 6mbps. The difference is night and day, especially for Youtube. I can now regularly watch 720p Youtube videos even while someone else is streaming an SD quality netflix. Before, I couldn't even do that while being the only one using the connection. For non-HD, I think you'll be just fine.

exile wrote:Some talk of cord-cutting in the house. However, we get 7Mbps at best. Will that work reliably? Has anyone tried?

No more than two concurrent streams. No need for HD as our television gear is rather stone-age.

If it makes any difference, this is in Santa Clara, CA (Bay Area for those SoCal people tempted to think Santa Clarita)

1080p streaming on Netflix uses 5.1mbps last I saw. I've found that 7.5mbps at my house (bonded Fusion service at about 11,000 feet from the CO) is adequate to stream a movie at full resolution on my TV while the kids are watching something (presumably at 720p, I must admit I never checked) on their tablet.

Two non-HD streams should be no trouble.

Only 7 mbps? Pardon me while I weep.

I get 3 or 3.5. Netflix works seamlessly. Never had a problem. It is possible shows might load more quickly if my connection were faster but, once they're loaded, they don't sputter or stop or anything like that. My TV is HD but I'm not sure that's making a difference with Netflix.

We have not tried watching two Netflix streams at once. But it's no problem for one person to use the computer while someone else is watching Netflix on the TV. Neither is slower than usual.

the new speedtest at dslreports.com has a setting that you can simulate multiple streams, and set the size of those streams...

It's been interesting to see the perception of required performance go up sharply recently. I guess we're victims of all the Gigabit hype, as well as huge new claimed cable speeds.

Time-of-day consistency, latency, jitter are all important, but they're never mentioned. A dedicated and stable connection with reasonable latency often will "feel" better than a sometimes-snappy but widely variable cable line.

And speed tests contribute to the confusions in perception, because many shared network providers favor speed testing over regular traffic. (!!!!)

Verizon was recently called out for trying to upgrade a customer - who happened to be a streaming media expert - from 50Mbps to 75Mbps for "smoother video viewing". He's blogged about it, and the situation has since been covered by Ars, Fool and other outlets. See his post here: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2015/04/ ... aming.html

So, yes, Netflix will work just fine, and deliver HD, even with "only" 6Mbps.

Netflix has a really cool test video which displays your streaming speed and the video quality/resolution it is streaming on said speed.

I do not know how you find it in Netflix but I have it in My List on Netflix. When playing it in a browser, this is the URL:

http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid ... a-32638203

I'm not sure if this will work for others however you might try logging into Netflix and then clicking the above link. It should then play in your web browser.

The test shows that the Netflix 720 HD stream is at 3Mbps and 1080 stream is 5.8Mbps. Less speed can actually still likely work, with some compression and bit of quality loss experienced.

FWIW, when I was on a Sonic 4.5Mbps speed, I was able to stream Netflix in HD without any noticeable issue.

I think if you search for "Test" in the Netflix interface, you will find a whole bunch of test movies...

bobrk wrote:I think if you search for "Test" in the Netflix interface, you will find a whole bunch of test movies...

Looks like there are a few tests video streams but not the one I link to above, which seems to be the most useful.

Ah, yes, I remember that one. There were some other ones, too, with employees walking around and doing weird things. The readout of the bit rate is the most important part, for sure.