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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
I always thought that BBC had Multicast-BGP arrangement with the participant ISPs? Isn't this perfect application for multicast? It would be nice if bandwidth would only be consumed once, and duplicated at branching points, not unicast from BBC's network to all customers individually.
Skimming the article I couldn't find info on whether this is archived-videos type service like Youtube, or for streaming the same over-the-air broadcast that you could pick on normal TV - assuming the latter since the charts talk about "BBCW_1", (assuming these are channels).
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.
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.
Push the cost off on the end-user and the ISP will benefit. All kidding aside, this would be a pretty huge non-issue if they sucked it up and went to fiber like they have been told to do time and time again. The problem here is capping bandwidth usage in areas where it was previously uncapped encourages users NOT to use a high-bandwidth service like iPlayer which is bad for the BBC's business model as well as many other downloading/streaming sites. Places which allow you to download music and movies legally for pay(iTunes for example)stand to take a huge business cut because people will only download the bear minimum.
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
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.
I've just had an upgrade from Virgin Media to 20Mbps. I do get that speed, too. Trouble is, after I've downloaded a gig or two, I get throttled back to 5Mbps until midnight. Virgin reserve the right to tweak these parameters at their own convenience. I guess that is the future we have to get used to.
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.
Crap, I missed Bandwidth Explosion Bodes I and II. Were they any good? Are they available on a Mac?
Are they some kind of guitar hero/FPS mashup?
More music, fewer hits
Anyone who's sat down and looked at their ISP's Fair Use policy will realise that they just aren't set up to provide the speeds they advertise at anything like a decent capacity. Talk of downloads replacing movies is hilarious when your ISP throws a strop when you download more than 5GB (less than one SD DVD!) in a single evening. Seriously, all the bluster about amazing high-speed ADSL networks is completely overstated by the ISPs. They can perhaps provide the advertised speeds of 2Mbps as a peak for a small amount of their customer base at a given time, but the mean network traffic probably only equates to about 128kbps per customer.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well let's flip it around. The ISPs are complaining about the minority who consume massively, when there's no rule against massive consumption? What about the majority of users who are paying for the full buffet but then only consuming the bandwidth equivalent of a light snack? The reality here is that the ISPs want to be able to charge a flat rate to people who underconsume, while charging per GB to people who overconsume, and they shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways. If ISPs want to introduce a consumption-based pricing model, then the cost of access for people who use relatively little bandwidth should go down overall, and somehow I don't see that happening. I have little sympathy for a group of companies that are actively trying to get the best of both worlds at their customers' expense.
I expect we'll see a lot of hybrid models that are really crappy deals for consumers. For example, Bell Sympatico recently introduced bandwidth fees on top of their already uncompetitive monthly prices. Needless to say, the price per GB ($1.50 per) over your plan's cap is also exceptionally high compared to other offerings in the market. If you go to their support site, you can see such hilarious questions as "How much Internet is included in my plan?" Remember, it's not a dumptruck, it's a series of tubes! Perhaps it's no coincidence that I'm switching from Bell to an ISP with monthly rates, bandwidth caps and overage fees that are actually reasonable.
I think you'll find that ISPs would moan a lot less if the telcos weren't charging extortionate fees.
Firstly, non-UK slashdotters should realise that PlusNet is a pretty lame ISP by most peoples standards, and doesn't have a huge number of users, so can't be taken as a reliable data point.
Secondly, the whole philosophy behind IPlayer is fundamentally flawed. I am a linux user, who pays the three-figure license fee every year. How dare they say I can't use BBC content I have already paid for how I like? I understand that Auntie gets a significant amount of revenue selling its content to overseas networks - but this is unrelated to the Internet. You can't regulate Jonny American downloading the latest episodes of Dr. Who but you can certainly regulate how much an American TV network must pay to show it. The Beeb is listening too much to traditional media types who don't fully grasp how the internet works. They don't understand to have a public TV service (a fantastic thing in my opinion, and most Britons agree with me) you must allow unrestricted downloads. Britons downloading BBC content are simply utilising what they already pay for. Foreigners downloading the content are extending the reach of British culture. Forcing it through a proprietary system is ridiculous.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
Maybe they shouldn't have sold the world bandwidth they couldn't deliver, then tried to cover up the fact with (un)Fair Usage policies on those who expected to get the service and speed they paid for!
I'm sorry, (ISP), but it's your own damn fault you sold too much to too many people. In every other business throughout the world, selling a service or product you KNOW can't deliver is called Fraud. I hope they hang you all out to dry.
Let the CEO's soak up the cost; they decided on the Snake Oil policy.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
So they spelled it wrong in the title. They're movies of... er... an "educational" persuasion: Bandwidth Explosion Bodies 1-3 (downloadable through your local USENET or bittorrent client).
It's a real problem because the UK infrastructure architecture is plain bizarre.
There are two types of ISPs,
BT / Virgin / Easynet + a few others who have unbundled kit in exchanges and their own pipes to exchanges
Everyone else who resells capacity from the above, who pays a fixed price for capacity irrespective of where in the country it came from.
All that capacity goes back to telehouse where LINX is and all the content and internet exchange takes place.
There is no peering at the local exchanges, or apart from London or Manchester.
So when a two BBC users with the P2P iplayer service but different ISPs, all the traffic goes to London and back again. Even if it's the same ISP the ISP doesn't see it until it leaves the resellers pipes in London at which point it gets shipped back down the pipe it came from. When I downloaded a programme on my laptop that was already on my desktop PC I got a download rate of 500Mbits as it streamed across my internal gigabit LAN - if we had peering at the exchanges and decent ADSL uplinks we should be able to do that within metropolitan areas.
Now this may work itself out - there aren't any really long distances in the UK, so we should be able to run 10Gbit ethernet backhaul between exchanges relatively quickly and cheaply for unbundled providers, but to really do it well we need peering in every major city between the majority of ISPs rather than the current model where every ISP ships all their traffic to London.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
No, it's really not.
You don't hear customers complaining they can't draw the max amperage their house's wiring will take, because they understood that if everyone did that, there'd be brownouts.I can draw the max amperage in my house if I see fit to do so. You do have a point though that the network probably couldn't handle everybody deciding to do it at the same time, but at the end of the day the electric company isn't going to start restricting my use of specific appliances -- they will either provide me with the power I want or cut me off (rolling blackouts) if the grid can't handle it. They aren't going to tell me that my hot tub is a less legitimate use then my washing machine.
Anyway, you missed the point. Bytes themselves do not cost money. A kilowatt hour does. A kilowatt hour represents a specific amount of energy (3,600,000 joules if you are curious) that cost money (in the form of fuel for the power plant) to produce. A byte doesn't cost anything to transit -- the underlying capacity of the pipe itself is what costs money. An idle pipe costs the same amount of money as one running at 100% capacity.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I think multicast would work well for non-live downloads as well, especially in conjunction with P2P. If the BBC server had a continuous running Multicast stream, then the iPlayer could start downloading at wherever it was in the stream, and then only use P2P to pick up the few stray packets that it missed (due to the fact that there are no resends in a multicast session).
To deal with different speed connections, they could have multiple streams each running at some lowest-common-denominator speed, and staggered in time. That way someone on a 500kbps line would connect to only a single stream, but someone on a 3Mbsp connection, would connect to 6 of them. And of course, they could dynamically increase and decrease the number of streams for a particular show depending on relative demand.
The total bandwidth used by BBC wouldn't be much more than they would be using by seeding a torrent, the amount of congestion in the last mile would be much less than occurs with P2P, and the overall network bandwidth would be greatly reduced compared to individual downloads.
Of course this doesn't work well with video-on-demand, but then again neither does P2P because both give chunks of the file out of order. However, if most of the downloads were automatic due to people subscribing to certain feeds, it would work great.
I'm quite familiar with IP transit, seeing as how I used to work for an ISP. We were billed via the 95th percentile, not via bytes transferred.
You can make the argument that heavy p2p users push up the average resulting in higher bills, but I'm just going to come back with "Don't give your customers bandwidth you can't afford to support".
Burstable bandwidth and/or lower bandwidth caps a much more fair solution to this problem then selectively interfering with specific protocols because you don't happen to like them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.