44 HD Films a Second

One of our local monopolies, Time Warner Cable, advertises about the internet speeds it offers on its website.

Time Warner's Ultimate (i.e., highest level) package allows a download speed up to 50 Mbps.  The Everyday Low Price package (i.e., lowest level) allows a download speed of up to 2 Mbps.

Ignoring the fact that this speed can graciously be called Stone Age, it will get worse.

A little background...

Going from smallest to largest: byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, and yottabyte.

For this discussion we only need the first 5.  From the BBC:

The "fastest ever" broadband speeds have been achieved in a test in London, raising hopes of more efficient data transfer via existing infrastructure. 

Alcatel-Lucent and BT said speeds of 1.4 terabits per second were achieved during their joint test - enough to send 44 uncompressed HD films a second.

Like any good monopoly, Time Warner and all the other internet providers will throw up some smoke screen and make sure that consumers in the U.S. pay outrageous prices for slow internet speed.

According to Ookla, the United States has the 31st fastest internet speed.  We come right after Russia (30) and ahead of Israel (32).