Presto has expressed their disappointment in the current state of the National Broadband Network, and says the decision to abandoning Labor's vision of the NBN for a "multi-technology mix" is making watching 4K content harder than it should be.
Speaking just shortly after Presto announced the addition of more than 2,500 hours of HD content to its streaming library, Presto IP services senior product manager Richard Cole says had the government stayed with the previous Labor government's FTTP (Fibre-To-The-Premise) plan, delivering 4K to homes "wouldn’t have been an issue". However, because the Coalition government opted to change the NBN to a "multi-technology mix", with some homes getting FTTP, others getting FTTN (Fibre-To-The-Node), and the rest staying with existing technologies such as HFC, achieving consistent download speeds needed for streaming 4K is going to be much more difficult now.
"At this stage, the state of the Australian internet is that there’s a very small number of customers who have a connection strong enough to receive 4K in anything like a consistent fashion," said Cole. While 4K streaming requires a minimum of 25 Mbps per stream, and that the Coalition's NBN does promise minimum speeds of 25 Mbps to most households, the biggest problem Mr. Cole says is the consistency of the connection speed that is a concern to 4K adoption. "It’s not just a case of having 25 Mbps, it’s having it consistently for two and a half hours," says Cole.
Presto's biggest rival, Netflix, already offers 4K video streaming for selected programming, but very few users in Australia can currently take advantage of these 2160p streams (providing 2160 horizontal lines of resolution, compared to 1080 lines for HD streams), not only due to the lack of ultra fast broadband connections, but also due to the small number of households with 4K TVs.
Mr. Cole says that for the next 18 months at least, 4K content will mainly be delivered via downloads and physical media, while streaming speeds catch up to the level required for 4K.
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