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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."
And sometimes demand drives supply.
Speaking as an American, where all our telecoms basically conspire to screw the consumer and offer substandard bandwidth, I long for the day when the demand for bandwidth surpasses the ability of their crappy networks to handle it, sparking an all out bandwidth arms race amongst providers desperate to cater to the needs to demanding consumers. I dream of the slug-like cable and phone companies being driven under by agile local providers...It will get to the point where small networks will be able to compete, because the advantages of a giant infrastructure are of limited use in a local environment.
So pardon me if I don't give a crap if the little ISPs are feeling the pinch. If they'd used a little foresight, they'd have plenty of free bandwidth.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The BBC iPlayer lets you download content for a week or a month after it was shown on the channel, as well as letting you stream it. The iPlayer then starts a background service (which is always running) which uses P2P to distribute the files you've downloaded to others. It saves the BBC bandwidth, but it does mean it'll chew your bandwidth allowance if you use it a lot or have Windows running and don't kill the process.
Multicast would be a good idea for live broadcasts, though.
Not that I actually use any of it - my wireless and 2GB cap wouldn't cope. A co-worker found the "always running, even when iPlayer isn't" service recently, though.
In my suspiciously successful attempts at using this aspect of iPlayer outside the UK, I discovered the actual video data being sent from an Akamai-controlled IP address. So presumably, if ISPs want to control bandwidth usage from this source, they'd just need to host an Akamai node thingy?
The video quality for this 'lesser' iPlayer is still pretty good. I clocked it at about 100kB/s (i.e. ~800kbit/s) - it looks okay fullscreen if you're using the computer as a telly. Haven't tried the Kontiki thing yet - I've been doing this on my Macs...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
There's nothing inherently wrong with over subscription -- it would be pretty stupid to pay your Tier 1 provider to provide a dedicated 3.0mbits for Grandma who only wants to check her e-mail -- the problem starts when they try to cheap out and use a bad oversubscription ratio.
To be fair, a few years ago nobody could have seen the rise of p2p (though foresight should have predicted the rise of streaming video), so that probably changed the ratios they should be using. I lose all sympathy for them though when they whine about how much money upgrades cost.... most of these outfits (here in the states anyway) are literally swimming in profit. It's not as though they are running their businesses in the red and can't afford to invest in upgrades.
Beyond that, I really don't understand this push to "shape" p2p traffic. Wouldn't it be much more fair to just give your customers the highest amount of bandwidth that you can provide them with and allow them to use it as they see fit? What's the damn point of raising the speed again and again if you can't actually provide it to your end users?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The dishonesty is reason enough to be annoyed with them. Actually, I think the behavior of some ISPs borders on fraud and it could be much worse for them than a few people hating them:
;-)
They could get sued (happened to Comcast recently, sorry I can't find the link anymore) and maybe end up having to pay large damages.
There is also another way of offering 20mbps and not have it overused:
Sell 20mbps for the first 50 Gbyte/month and make the limitation clear in your advertisments. Throttle those who exceed it to dial-up speed... and announce that in advance as well. That would make it a fair deal, and anyone who still runs into the limit won't get much sympathy from me
C - the footgun of programming languages