Will ISPs Spoil Online Video?

mrspin writes "last100 writes: "With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There's a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don't have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. One way ISPs attempt to conceal this problem is to place a cap of say 1GB per-month per user, something which is common in the UK for many of the lower-cost broadband packages on the market. Considering that a mere three hours viewing of Joost (the new online video service from the founders of Skype) would all but use up this monthly allowance, it's clear that lots of Internet users aren't invited to the party. But what about those who (like me) pay more for 'unlimited' broadband access? There shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong." The article then goes on to discuss the recent trend of bandwidth throttling based on techniques such as packet shaping which punishes p2p traffic whether it's legitimate or not."

Comments

Australia

[name*censored*]

This is a particular problem in Australia, where no *truly* unlimited consumer internet plan exists. All of the plans that advertise themselves as "unlimited" will actually cap you after xGBs (although I've seen this go as high as 120gb, which isn't exactly something you'd have to work to ration). The reason for this is that the main telecom provider (Telstra) does not sell bandwidth to it's competitors; it rents it (the other ISPs cannot possibly provide unlimited internet at a reasonable price and stay afloat), and Telstra cannot itself offer truly unlimited broadband (same reason, plus it would be held up on anti-competitive charges). Although as far as I'm aware, no ISP here shapes p2p bandwidth (although some ISPs count uploading towards the usage limit/severely restrict the upload speeds to ridiculously slow rates compared with the download speeds, in part to combat p2p).

An interesting side-note; Telstra were moderately recently held up on false advertising charges for using the word "unlimited" to describe their capped service. They have now changed the name to "Liberty".

Re:The real reason they don't want you to download

[Holi]

The ISPs by law can not examine what data is being transmitted without loosing common carrier status (at which point, they get a lot more government regulation)

Which would be very comforting if ISP's had common carrier status to begin with.

I don't understand who keeps spreading these rumors but for the last time, ISP's do NOT have common carrier status. They are what are called ESP's (Enhanced Service Providers) and do not warrant the protection that common carrier status provides.

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[compro01]

but there is no limit, except the max speed, to how much data I can transfer in a month.

that's where things diverge. a lot of ISPs have transfer limits, which, more often than not, are not specificed (comcast for example).

I'm an ISP

[eriklou]

I pretty much represent a small ISP in rural Washington state. Bandwidth prices for us are so outrageous, $300 per mb, and this is only because there is one major seller of bandwidth in our area, NOANET. So we have to throttle types of connections, Bit-Torrent is the major one. We would love to open the net to what it should be but its just not possible with the price gouging that happens every place but the cities.

So as an ISP I'm saying we could do it if we didn't get bent over all the time for bandwidth.

You're getting ripped off, dude

[Nicolas MONNET]

I pay 29 EUR a month for 24 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up. Plus free international phone. Plus wifi. Plus TV. Free PVR which I don't even use for lack of a TV. Also 1 GB of hosting space, unmetered.

Within a year I should get 50 Mbps (symmetrical) FTTH.

http://www.free.fr