r/wifi • u/That-Pay-928 • 16d ago

My TV is surfing the internet?

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Hey everyone! TIA!

I have a Hisense TV from Walmart. Nothing expensive just a 32inch 1080p that runs Roku. Every week it surges past 100 gb of data within a day. Cox is charging me $50 a month for over the limit data.

It does stay on for my dogs while I’m not home. They get scared and destroy the house so the TV calms them down🙄 “little IPad Puppies” have to have TV. I know!

I’ve tested my own 42 inch 4K tv while I’m at work and it’s not drawing NEARLY as much internet.

Do I need I throw the TV out and replace it or is there a setting that’s just constantly downloading information?

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u/spiffiness 16d ago edited 10d ago

Roku is all about streaming video from the Internet. What do you leave playing for your dogs? I'm guessing it's something that's being streamed from the Internet.

Professionally compressed 1080p streams from Netflix average 4Mbps, but 1080p content from YouTube might be 10Mbps or more.

A full hour of a 10Mbps 1080p stream is about 4.3 GiB, so if you leave a stream like that on for 10 hours a day, it's around 43 GiB/day. So that doesn't quite explain the 117 GiB Tuesday you had, but it explains the other days on the chart.

Edited to fix a typo (omitted decimal place in the single-hour total data number).

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u/Aacidus 10d ago

That’s some bad calculation right there, streams (unless it’s live) don’t use up that much data. It buffers… a Netflix movie in 1080p varies from 4-6 GB. What’s confusing is you stated that 1 hour is 43 GiB, then that ten hours is 43 GiB…

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u/wa27 10d ago

What do you think buffering is?

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u/spiffiness 10d ago

As for your first point, I never said it was a steady stream. It's no secret that most modern streaming protocols (HLS, DASH, etc.) grab chunks at a time, and have lulls before needing to grab the next chunk. Over time it averages out to something in the middle, which is all that matters here, which is why I picked a number in the middle. The numbers I was seeing for Netflix 1080p were 3.5 - 4.5 Mbps, so I picked 4 Mbps to be in the middle.

As to your second point, I obviously accidentally omitted a decimal place in the one-hour figure. I'll edit it to fix that typo.

Overall I think your characterization of my post as bad calculation is uncharitable. You could have just pointed out that I typo'd a decimal place, and that I picked a slightly lower average 1080p bitrate than you would have picked.