Is slingbox a bandwith hog?

[Al Neri]

What's up --

I was thinking about dropping cable service at my condo and piggybacking on my house's cable connection being that I basically watch 2-3 channels in my condo (where I live during the week) and using my home (weekends) connection - i have the extra cable box in a room that nobody watches TV with an internet connection.

The only question is - how much of an internet hog will it be at my house - and how much at my condo?

 

[Al Neri]

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Well, it does stream video, and so yeah, it will require a bit of bandwidth. IIRC, someone told me that it will adjust the quality to what kind of transfer rates your connection is capable of.

In short, it'll probably use whatever it can get. However, the limit will probably be on the upstream speed at your home.

 

[Crono]

I don't have slingbox, but I think it scales compression based on your connection speed, like Orb (which I do use) does. So your video quality depends on your speed. I'm sure you can limit how much bandwidth slingbox uses, but in order to get decent quality, Slingbox would probably need at least 300Kbps to 500Kbps. So if your house has 1Mbps upload and your condo has 3Mbps download or greater, you should be ok even simultaneously using the connection at your condo for casual surfing or downloads. Don't expect to be able to download like 15 files at a time, use VoIP, play network games, run torrents, and use video on demand all at the same time, though (unless you are one of those lucky persons with FiOS or greater).

EDIT: To answer simply, no, it's not a bandwidth hog, or at least not any more than other devices using your line (unless you want it to be).

EDIT #2: The Slingbox community can probably provide more accurate information