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BBC iPlayer Bandwidth Explosion Bodes Ill For ISPs
penfold69 writes "Dave Tomlinson is one of the network gurus at PlusNET PLC, a Tier-2 ISP in the UK. He recently put up a blog post about the ramifications of the BBC iPlayer for the ISP industry in the UK. The post makes some very interesting reading regarding the bandwidth usage triggered by the iPlayer, and raises timely questions about the Net Neutrality debate. The Register also picked up on this story with a good review of who is going to have to pay for all this legal video streaming."
Could we do a better job if we could cache intelligently and do p2p and whatever else made sense in the absence of copyright restraints on the setup?
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Most advertise "unlimited bandwidth" or "unlimited transfer". Now that fine-print isn't going to save them.
Live by the marketing hype, die by the same.
Regards,
Website Hosting
I'll pay... or more to the point, I have paid.
"unlimited" was part of the title of my service plan; so, unlimited bits at the contract rate or I get to sue!
There is no neutrality issue; what we are debating is greed(or incompetence coupled with back tracking and lying) in newspeak!
The post makes some very interesting reading regarding the bandwidth usage triggered by the iPlayer
It really wasn't that interesting. He mostly just shows you a bunch of network traffic graphs.
raises timely questions about the Net Neutrality debate.
His argument basically boils down to "Waaa! Customers are actually using their internet connections! The BBC has lots of money, give some of it to us! Waaa!".
This particular ISP may be bitching and moaning but frankly that's because they're discovering they can't compete. Virgin Media (Cable) recently announced a UK-wide upgrade for all of it's customers. My currently 4MB connection is going up to 10MB. I don't hear the any bitching from them, and they clearly wouldn't be doing it if bandwidth was really a problem.
The BBC pay their ISP, the consumers pay theirs, everyone in between negotiates traffic prices between themselves. Where exactly is the problem?
The only issue I can see is that dishonest ISPs want to keep charging their customers the "Unlimted* Fast** internet for the low low price of $X a month!", whilst either denying them the service being advertised by throttling some traffic, or charging the server side twice, once for the real cost and once for "access to consumers".
It's greed and weaseling out of advertised services, pure and simple.
The reality is that that "extra penny a minute" that they "eat" is because they didn't PLAN on you using the bandwidth that
the ISPs promised you and then seriously overbooked for a major profit. It's not that the claims weren't true on the networking
solutions being better overall- it's that greedy people didn't implement what they claimed and pocketed the extra, we can't seem
to get people to move to things like IP Multicast to shed most of that load, and things like the aforementioned.
I don't go boo-hoo for the ISPs. They knew this was going to eventually happen. They didn't prepare for it. They had the
chance to do the right thing and they didn't- and still aren't. All in the name of large profits- something that nobody can
sustain for long, ever. Nobody gets rich quick save by stealing or dumb luck. Once people start remembering that concept
perhaps sanity will resume...naaahhh...we would never have that, now would we?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The idea that everything must be monetized to have value is irksome and tiring. This fallacy permeates the article and is, in my opinion, why the article sometimes misses the mark.
I think it's also interesting to note that the main point of the article is "ISPs, who are in the business of selling connectivity and bandwidth, are doomed because the demand for connectivity and bandwidth is large and getting larger." Imagine how silly it would be to say "grocery stores, who are in the business of selling food, are doomed because the demand for food is large and getting larger."
The fact that demand is increasing would be a good sign for most industries. (Perhaps the ISPs view it as a bad thing only because they are so accustomed to over-selling their networks and not having customers actually use what they pay for?) This is not the death knell for ISPs, this is an opportunity for them to compete, expand, and sell more of their product. Until they wake up and understand this, they will keep complaining and deliver shoddy service, I guess. But make no mistake: the consumer thirst for high-bandwidth Internet applications is a good thing.
There are essentially two problems plaguing the UK, the first is that we don't have particularly good last-mile infrastructure, specifically everyone is on copper lines and as such we're looking at a limit of around 24mbps with ADSL2 if you're lucky enough to be close to the exchange. For us to achieve faster speeds investment is going to be needed to replace all that copper with fibre, that solves the issue of a possible max speed issue that's going to hit the UK hard a few years down the road as other nations advanced their connection speeds and we hit a brick wall.
The second issue is the UK's internet backbone, it's simply not up to scratch and doesn't meet todays requirements in terms of bandwidth. Many people laugh when there are articles about how the internet is going to run out of spare bandwidth, but the fact is in the UK it's happening, the whole reason ISPs over the past few years have gone from true unlimited to heavily capped is because bandwidth is having to be rationed, there just isn't enough room on the backbone for everyone's requirements in an unlimited world.
As such, the UK also needs investment in it's internet backbone and whilst BT is bringing implementing 21CN, whilst I don't know the technical details it seems a mere band-aid fix as some people in the industry have commented that there will still be similar bandwidth caps as today.
It's not an unsolvable problem, on the contrary the solution is there - Japan with a population double that of the UK quite happily handles 100mbps connections to end users with the requirement for caps and their internet backbone falling over as a result. There are plenty of other examples like Sweden, however some may argue that as Sweden only has around 1/10th the UK's population that they don't have enough end users to clog the pipes up, hence why Japan is a much better example. South Korea is a decent example also at around 5/6ths of the UK's population. The core issue is politics and who's going to give up short term profits temporarily for vastly improved long term profits.
The UK simply needs investment in it's internet infrastructure, but it needs everyone work together. BT are semi-interested in updating their backbone but quite rightly they think why should they when it's ISPs and content providers that are going to make the money off of it? The fact is that a one off investment (to ensure net neutrality) by the major players is required - BT, ISPs, the Goverment and yes, possibly even the BBC and other major content providers.
It's all very well ISPs complaining it's costing them a fortune currently, but when they're not willing to give up that money to BT for infrastructure improvements then they can't realistically expect a solution.
One final point is that it doesn't help the goverment wasting ISP's time and money with their threats about getting rid of file sharers. It's all very well the goverment, ISPs and BT whining about the problems the UK has with internet access, but when they're all doing nothing about the problems, or in the governments case, making the problem worse then they can quite frankly shut up and put up. The only downside to that is, it's us, the end users that suffer.