Slashdot Mirror
BBC and ISPs Clash over iPlayer
randomtimes writes "A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC. ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope. '"The iPlayer has come along and made downloading a legal and mass market activity," said Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk. He said he believed ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they now face. "They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing," he said. ISPs needed to stop using the term 'unlimited' to describe their services and make it clear that if people wanted to watch hours of downloaded video content they would have to pay a higher tariff, he added.'"
We constantly have clients that think they can get 100000 TB of storage and 1000000 ZB of transfer for $3.95/mth. Then they get attitudes when we charge them $30/Mbps.
I'm torn as to lay blame to other providers for running unethical marketing campaigns.(e.g. get unlomited everything only to have a buried clause in a TOS/AUP/etc. that nullifies all the marketing promises.) or people not performing due-diligence.
Regards,
Website Hosting
That's exactly right. For years ISPs have been flagrantly misrepresenting their services, using words like "unlimited" and quoting download speeds that you might have a hope of getting within 10% of at 3am. They have been playing their customers for fools, but now that content providers are beginning to provide more and more of their productions, suddenly the ISPs are screaming at the content providers and the customers.
I think that consumer protection laws need to be beefed up to protect consumers against the outrageous practices of ISPs.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unprofitable business models continue to abound in the internet world. Visit http://www.techcrunch.com/ to see a roster of profitless companies with names like Greedr, Feebo, Dumbr, and a whole host of "this was the only domain name I could find" companies who continue to give away the farm and pray for revenue on the other end.
If Net Neutrality laws were in place, the ISPs couldn't be "having discussions" over whether they can extort the BBC into paying them extra. Service providers would then be forced to market and sell their services honestly, because they couldn't get someone else to pay for the bandwidth they're selling.
The BBC pays for upstream bandwidth. Consumers pay for downstream bandwidth. But ISPs don't actually have the bandwidth they're selling, so they want the BBC to pay as well for the bandwidth consumers already paid for. It's ridiculous.
But Mr Gunter [from ISP Tiscali] said he was not convinced this would help.
"I have heard that the BBC is working on building a caching infrastructure so that storage devices can go on an ISP's network but even if it goes ahead it doesn't save costs on the backhaul network," he said. The solution, brought to you courtesy of "Geoff Bennett, director of product marketing at optical equipment maker Infinera" is for ISPs to upgrade the 2nd mile.
Does anyone other than the ISPs think that having content producers chip in is a good idea?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
wii to receive this streaming, not exactly the cause but still informative
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
"Stop letting people use the bandwith we sold them!"
At the very least they look incompetant having so woefully underestimated the needs of their customers and over estimated their services.
At the worst they look crinminal for misselling a service and now they're getting outted by these services that have outed them.
If the users are over using their bandwith as given to them in their contracts then give them the surcharge or cut them off. The BBC has payed for their bandwith so there's no reason to get angry there. Frankly this has been an amazingly long time coming and we can only hope that people pick up and start class action suits for these shady business practices. Personally when I have my 8 meg connection which was sold to me via the internet on this BT page "BT UNLIMITED INTERNET UP 8Mb CONNECTION" and several times hearing them claim "Unlimited Downloads" I don't expect to record a graph of my conneciton speeds dropping during peak times to maybe 32KB/s, it's just not acceptable.
When I phone my friends up during peak times I don't get to say fewer words per second, so why is my internet connection any different?
A proper IT business should earn enough to invest into next-gen products, ISPs just want to milk dry already existing infrastructure and don't want to invest money - they also (in the UK especially) use deceptive practices that are now catching up with them. What would have happened if Intel stopped investing into new fabs and R&D? This would have allowed them to cut prices for CURRENT chips big time, so everyone would get a high end CPU, but in 3-5 years time you will have no faster chip and a lot of new stuff driven by increase in power (or bandwidth) won't appear.
At the very least ISPs that limit traffic should never be able to use word "unlimited" in the ads - that's bordering on fraud really or obtaining money by deception.
I think that consumer protection laws need to be beefed up to protect consumers against the outrageous practices of ISPs.
We're in this mess partly because the governments saw fit to grant monopolies to various companies who now behave like monopolies. Raise your hand if you're shocked. We should always be leery of patching bad government with more government, because it's probably going to turn out to be bad government, and then people will want to...
But, yes, your're right, these guys are selling 'Free' stuff and 'free' doesn't exist. In a non-monopoly position you might assume the customers are fools, but when they have no choice, it could be either. Certainly it's hard to chasten the customer put into this position if he doesn't have choice.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
UK ISPs are about to get a lot more traffic...
iPlayer has just been announced for Wii http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7338344.stm
Why do the ISPs keep acting like victims? The fact of the matter is, they sold their service promising a certain level of speed. Now, when they can't consistently provide what they promised, they blame content providers and their users. It's their fault for over-selling.
Let's see if I've got this right.
Consumers upgrade to high-speed internet. They pay for it.
When they actually start to use it, the ISPs start bitching about bandwidth and demanding more money.
...laura
Completely mental, even disregarding the obvious point that they're already getting paid at both ends for their fucking bandwidth.
Imagine that you're selling product X. The lovely BBC comes with an application that encourages lots of people to use lots of X. Fantastic! Coke and hookers all round!
Unless you've come up with some sort of freakish business model which relies on people paying for lots of X without actually using it. In which case, well, you're probably fucked.
Good.
Each subscriber pays for his little tube, and the BBC pays for it's tube big enough to carry 300 Benny Hill streams.
So what's the problem? Why are ISPs bitching?
This is as rediculous as trying to make YouTube or any other high bandwidth site pay for the extra bandwidth that their users eat up. If the ISP claims they have unlimited, then the ISP should have to eat their words when push comes to shove and all the users actually want to utilize 10% of the "unlimited" bandwidth they're supposed to be getting.
LONDON (AP) -- Google Apps today announced its first big hit: an AsciiArt video streaming proxy aimed at struggling British ISPs.
Coded by a Melvin Haymeggle, a young college student, in a little under 18 hours, the proxy uses the open-source video player MPlayer, and the video display library aalib, to convert streaming video on-the-fly into ASCII art.
"At first it was just a joke between me and a few friends," said Haymeggle. "Me and my roommates used it to mess with people leaching our wireless to watch porn. But then Google App Engine was announced, and we figured it would be fun to write up some Python bindings for it."
The announcement comes at a perilous time for British ISPs, who have been struggling to come to terms with the increased demand for on-demand video as a result of BBC's iPlayer.
"We were shocked -- shocked! -- to realize that new Internet applications result in increased use of resources like bandwidth," said Charles Freskell, a spokesman for the British ISPs Association. "We were on the verge of sending a bill to the BBC when this proxy came along."
"Of course, we're still going to be monetizing content ruthlessly," he added quickly.
The application quickly and seamlessly converts the iPlayer's 1024x960, 24-bit colour, 30 frame-per-second video stream into an 80x25, 8-bit greyscale, 4 frame-per-second video stream. It is estimated that the proxy will save over 9 petabytes per furlong-fortnight.
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman could not be reached for comment. "He's just mad that everyone has forgotten this was available in Emacs since 1997," said a source close to the open source figurehead.
Carousel is a lie!
What if the ISP that provides BBC with bandwidth for all that video wanted to charge all the broadband users for the cost of extra capacity for having caused BBC to use what BBC is already paying for?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
When ISPs ask "who's going to pay for new infrastructure?", the answer should aways be "you are, in the form of reinvesting your profits into new development, like every other business does, you useless fracks". The "useless frack" part should be put at the end of most statements when dealing with government-mandated monopolies.
Not a typewriter
Home internet service is, for me, an entertainment service.
/hate/ the idea of pay-as-you-go internet service, because I would /constantly/ be worried, every time I logged on, about how much money I was spending. Consequently, I would not use it at all.
I would
Internet access is flat-rate or nothing for me.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Under an endpoint driven QoS scheme, if millions of consumers all try to watch the latest BBC special at once, most of them will get the "all connections busy" error. They can then wait (like with POTS), or just start up a bittorrent so that the show will be stored locally when they come back later.
The key to ethical QoS schemes is that the endpoints should do the tagging, *not* the ISP. The ISP should just charge for the tagging. Currently, the ISP decides which kinds of traffic are "unacceptable" and throttles them. That is unacceptable. QoS can make the internet work at least as well as the POTS network.
If you can provide proof to me that you have a regular residential connection and are getting the full advertised bandwidth sustained over a 30 minute period, and get this proof to me before 14:45 EST today, I will give you $1,000. For everyone else, you can now sue your ISP, because you now have a financial damage.
The amount of idiocy here is amazing. Most people seem to have the historical perspective of a three-year-old. And, they have about the same understanding of the marketplace.
Today, ISPs pay for bandwidth resources. They are indeed responsible at some level of compensation for how much they are sucking down from elsewhere on the network. Then they have their own infrastructure to contend with. Let's ignore for a moment that their infrastructure isn't quite up to the task of 10x (or 100x) increases in demand.
The ISP suddenly is sucking down 10x more stuff than they were before. This upsets all sorts of nice balances they have worked out with peering arrangements and the like. So, now the folks they are sucking it down from - higher tier carriers - want them to pay fro all this extra bandwidth. What, did you think they just plugged in and got whatever they wanted?
Next we have the problem that for the last 10-15 years or so the Internet has been defined by web surfing and email and not much else. Sure it would have been nice if a few ISPs had been forward-thinking enough to build out 10x the capacity they needed to operate. You know, just in case some need came along. Suprisingly, this isn't a very effective way to operate a business.
Finally, in the US (and I suspect elsewere as well) the Internet has grown to the proportions it has primarily because it has been incredibly cheap. What started out as $25 a month for dial-up became $15 a month for DSL. Were these prices sustainable in the face of increased usage? No. Heck, they were sustainable in the face of any usage at all because it was to build market share and prove to the investors that this "Internet" think actually was something people were interested in.
Today, you have businesses paying $400 a month for a T1 circuit that is 1.5Mb while home users are paying $50 a month for 15Mb. The home folks are getting a deal based on the bandwidth not really being used. If you were paying for guaranteed bandwidth capacity, like the business with the T1 is, you would be paying lots more. Probably not $4000 a month (10x a T1) but no way would it be $50 or even $100 a month. Expecting to have 15Mb access 24x7 for $50 a month will get you disappointed. Badly.
The reality of the situation in the US today is that the costs are finally beginning to come down a little - like maybe $300 for that T1 instead of $400. But on the consumer front if the ISPs can't justify shared bandwidth where the average use is far far less than the possible maximum, today's pricing isn't going to hold. At some level there is a cost-per-Mb that isn't going to go away. If you want to be assured of 15Mb access with 15Mb being used constantly you are really going to have to pay for 15Mb. Today, you are paying for something more like 0.005Mb and the providers "know" that is the real level of utilization.
When the level of utilization changes, they are going to have to eventually upgrade the system. Eventually. This isn't going to happen overnight because of the costs involved. Should they have done it before? Maybe. But as of a couple of years ago the majority of use was still email and web browsing and everyone was happy with their 0.005Mb slice of the pie.
I'd bet on people getting more access capability but not a lot more total capacity in the near term. That means things like 20Mb bandwidth that bogs down a lot at peak times and caps on total utilization. I'd also bet on some big price changes coming down. You want to download 20Gb a month at 15Mb/sec? Sure, but you are going to pay. And start paying a lot closer to what dedicated bandwidth costs businesses today.
ISP's should change their 'business' name to WEB Service Provider if they are going to make any assumptions about what applications I use and what is reasonable bandwidth. This mentality is part of what stifles Internet innovation, and why we are currently trying to force a world wide web browser to be everything it was never intended to be, ie: a platform in itself for applications. I'm paying for a tcp/ip connection and how I use that is up to me.
The irony is, of course, is the ISPs all put out flashy ads about how broadband allows you to get music and video.
But as soon as people do just what the service was explicitly advertised to do...the ISPs all start bleating.
I don't have any sympathy for them. They did it to themselves - they set the expectation you could use broadband to watch video, why are they acting all surprised when people do just that?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Why do ISPs pretend that their customers aren't paying them to access the content?
"Google should pay us to use our Pipes" "BBC should pay us to send video to our customers"
What BS. Google is paying to put data onto the internet. BBC is paying for the same privilege.
The ISP's customers are paying to get/send data to the internet. The customers download data from BBC. Two ISPs are getting paid for this transaction.
If you don't like it, get out of the ISP business. If you want to stay in, but your customers are using too much bandwidth, either raise prices, or limit their bandwidth. It's a simple solution, and most ISPs have done it for years. ISPs calculate how much bandwidth they have, and give each customer more than their 'fair share', because they know that not all customers will use all their bandwidth 24/7. The better ISPs do this calculation regularly, and compare it to the real traffic use of their customers, and reduce the bandwidth limits(or increase the available bandwidth) as needed to keep the network running smoothly.
Renationalise BT. It is the only way
The idea to privatise it came from the discredited market fundamentalists of the Thatcher era, and now its time to undo their foaming-at-the-mouth idealism and get the UK telecoms system back on track.
Make BT a profit-making enterprise has had the quite predictable affect that they've put profit ahead of modernising the IT industry and now we are left with a network that makes mainland Europe piss themselves laughing (I've heard of the prices and bandwidth they can get in Sweden. It makes me cry). Despite being the second largest economy in Europe, we are behind many European countries in terms of IT infrastructure:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7338252.stmIf we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
that is exactly what is going on, it is extortion. i am not one for BIG government regulation but there needs to be oversight of some sort, because if not then both the websites that serve news and other content and the customers will be squeezed by the ISPs because they have the keys to the tubes...
Honestly, how is the ISP that's going to have any leverage over the BBC?
Sure the ISP can send a bill. And then the BBC can laugh. And then the ISP can cut off customer access to the iPlayer, and THEN they can deal with the malestrom of calls from angry customers who want it back or they'll switch to another ISP.
There's every indication that the market is working just fine - despite blustery threats from different parties we are not actually seeing a problem to date. Please don't call for regulation which can only hamper everyone and screw up the internet far worse than you could ever possibly imagine.
This goes for the US as well as the UK. Who really thinks ISP's are going to make Apple and Google and other large content providers pay more money just so customers can reach them Not gonna happen, despite what ISP's threaten.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Internet will stay fixed cost. If ISPs start any anti-consumer practices that affect real-world bills they're going to see a massive backlash. And the public is going to start wondering if perhaps the reason that prices for bandwidth are so high is because the internet backbone is controlled by a monopoly. A monopoly that should be split up so that there can be affordable Internet.
Broadband is currently too expensive. Not too cheap. Cell phone plans are ridiculously expensive. This isn't due to the cost of doing business. It's due to the cost of supporting a worldwide phone monopoly. Break up AT&T.
Heck this might be a great way to stimulate our economy. Think how many jobs would be created if the cell, internet and phone networks were open to any company. Think of the innovation.
If you are Google, or the BBC, and you notice an ISP intentionally degrading service, redirect all traffic from that ISP to a page explaining the situation, with a link to the "contact us" page of the ISP.
If Google ever did this, I imagine neutrality issues would be resolved in days. The BBC should have a decent shot, right?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... and people who call doing it 'dishonest' or 'fraud' don't understand the basics of business, or how real economies work. The dishonesty lies in the marketing, not the business model.
;)
Oversubscription is a completely normal practice in many industries. Case in point: the banking industry. The amount of cash that banks hold is typically only between 5-10% of the money that it owes in deposits, meaning if everyone tried to withdraw 10% of their money at once, the bank would go broke. That's called a run on a bank, and it almost happened to some UK bank not too long ago before the government bailed it out. However, we don't accuse the bank of 'fraud' or 'dishonesty' because normally, people don't all try to withdraw their money at once. In fact, banks are (traditionally) the links between the consumer and business side of the economy, since the bank can then take the money that was just deposited and loan it out to businesses so they can invest and grow, or loan it to you so you can buy a house. If banks didn't 'oversubscribe' deposited money, that would severely restrict growth since there would be a severe lack of capital.
As a service provider, it's perfectly right to take into account the fact that not everyone will take advantage of your services to the maximum extent possible. If ISPs did not oversubscribe at ALL, then you would be guaranteed to see higher prices for all consumers. That's a situation that benefits no one.
The fact that most ISPs (at least in the States) have an unlimited billing model reflects the fact that the available capacity relative to utilized capacity was very high in the past. If I recall correctly, unlimited access plans became popular around the mid-90s on DIAL-UP, when the pipe from the home to the ISP was probably very small compared to the capacity the ISP had to the rest of the internet. In this kind of situation, trying to bill people by the hour would have been uneconomical, since the costs of maintaining a billing system would have exceeded the benefit to both the consumer and to the ISP -- the ISP knows that even a heavy user can't really ruin things for others on the same local hub, and most users would have approximately equal use of bandwidth, since there's only so much you can fit down a dial-up pipe.
Now the economic situation's changed--ISPs have probably underinvested in infrastructure, so they ARE being limited by their own connection to the net. At the same time, the ratio of usage between the heaviest and lightest users has probably widened considerably than a decade ago. Billing people according to usage might make (economic) sense again.
I wish ISPs would be 'more honest' with their language, but it will probably take legislation or regulation to force them to do so. Assuming there's competition, an ISP that advertises 'unlimited' usage is going to look better than a competitor that's honest about bandwidth caps. While YOU may appreciate honesty and candor, it seems pretty clear that the distinction would be lost on consumers who don't read Slashdot
If you are going to drag in the "regulation" boogeyman of the libertarian, consider that cartel-like collusion is the OPPOSITE of a free market machine.
And that's why I'm against things like cable companies having a lock on service in an area.
The ISP's are PERFECTLY capable of selling "metered" service by the megabyte to the consumer. This is a fact, and no one decries such plainly worded terms of service.
Metering however is (to my mind) the best possible outcome. It most naturally fits with what is really going on anyway (eventually someone is paying for bandwidth consumed) AND it allows for someone who really wants and needs a very high cap on bandwidth, or burst rates, to potentially be able to get that through a consumer service.
Metered internet would not really be any more expensive for almost anyone, and then it could bring about competition based on rates charged per MB instead of specious claims about how "blazing fast" cable modem is over DSL and vice versa.
The ISPs want to keep promising "unlimited" service and mislead the customer
I don't think they do it to mislead. They do it because everyone else does it, and they have to follow suit (though admittedly they don't lose any sleep over this). Just another reason why metered service is such a good idea, because it would bring along with it some truth in advertising perhaps.
in effect the ISPs want to derail what has been until now a free market. A free market doesn't care if the bytes you consume on your "unlimited" Internet are Google's bytes or the BBC.
Of course the ISP's want to do this. But even if they collude the power of the content providers along with demand from consumers is enough to keep them from succeeding. And frankly the ISP's are not even organized enough to collude very well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ISP "just" have to restore the original model of their business : You pay when you are sending data over the network (It's easy, it's like real mail).
The Bandwidth offered to content providers (here the BBC) is maybe simply to cheap, if the network can't handle all of this. Offer vs demand, it's Market economy: Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it works. Here it's the solution.
If you use Virgin Media "broadband" in the UK, you will find that after downloading a program from IPlayer, or any other legal service, your speed will be throttled right down as a punishment. It really makes their service look quite unusable in the modern world of legal video downloads. They even have the cheek to try to push their higher speed packages on you, but what's the point of a higher speed if you are just going to be throttled right down when you actually use it.
Back in the 80's and 90's, we already tried doing metered service. AOL, Compuserve, Genie, and other ISP's had hourly rates back in those days.
It made their product a niche product and eventually ALL of those companies abandoned that billing scheme in favor of unlimited pricing. Guess what happened? The internet hit critical mass BECAUSE they changed to "unlimited" monthly plans.
So now, in 2008, we are looking back into metered service? Good luck with that. My gut tells me "the people" will reject it. Just like they did back in the 80's and 90's. As soon as someone (Netzero) offered all you can eat for one price....the other competitors started bleeding customers. It will be the same this time around.
People don't want to look over their shoulders or monitor their usage. They do it for cell phones because they have to (no other choice). Not true for ISP's.
I was there back in the dial-up days, too. Ran my own WWIV board for a while.
I never called charge-per-minute BBSes, and I never called long-distance BBSes, because it was so stressful being ever-aware that the minutes were ticking by.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
that transfer should be free, and that its greedy ISP's trying to make money from nothing.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
As long as the ISPs don't pull my hair, scratch me with their nail or bite I can cope with this effimate nonsense.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Sounds like my local gym membership :-) Apart from in January.
You seriously think South Korea built enough backbone to support all of their population using it at the same time? Do you seriously think South Korean ISPs don't "oversell" their bandwidth too?
Strawman. The thing that GP was replying to has nothing to do with whether American ISPs have built enough bandwidth or not, or whether they've done it out of greed or whatever.
Let's review what you said in your earlier post:
So for example, if an ISP has a 45Gbps uplink, and promise 1.55Mbps to each subscriber, then they can only support 30,000 subscribers on that uplink.
That's a bad argument, and GP called you on it. Line costs for the uplink aren't "like a house," they're like the street network that connects your house to the rest of the country. The uplink is a shared resource, and the question is how to use it most efficiently, so that its users get the service they need for as low a price as possible.
People don't build networks the way you described, because it's economically inefficient. GP provided examples of many networks that aren't built like that: power, water, roads, telephone. The point of building a shared network is to lower every subscriber's cost for the amount of service they do use. A simple modification of your model is to add a percentage utilization factor. Let's suppose the correct factor is 30%; an ISP should build enough bandwidth to support 30% of its users getting full speed at once. This means that the 45Gbps uplink in the example above would support 100,000 subscribers. Since the cost of the uplink is now shared by more users, this means that each user may now pay less for their connection.
Now, you can argue that the ISPs don't have enough uplink or backbone capacity. Fine; in the modified model, this means the ISPs have built their network with too low of an utilization factor. The problem is that you're framing your claim that the ISPs are "fraudulently" selling capacity as a claim that the architecture of their network is wrong, because they don't build out a 100% utilization network. And that's just dumb.
Are you adequate?
This is the BBC not youtube it's a little more complicated that you think.
UK TV license payers have paid in full for BBC content *and* delivery of those programs ie currently BBC pay fully to get the program into your house (with money that the UK license payer has given them).
So the ISPs request is not completely bogus, I think they're wrong but you can see where they're coming from - their customers can rightly argue that they shouldn't have to pay anything more (higher ISP charges) to receive content they've already paid for *fully* to the BBC.
The problem is that ISPs stopped talking about contention of broadband lines at some point in the last couple of years, which has given users the impression that they are getting 8, 16 or 24Mbps guaranteed to themselves. In reality, of course, they are guaranteed a lot less than 1Mbps if you look at the actual deal (eg. 8Mbps, 50:1 contention, therefore 160Kbps guaranteed). The ISPs need to go back to their customers and re-educate them about contention, or better still explain it before the user signs up just as some of the more ethical ones used to.
At one point I agreed with you, charge people for what they actually use. Makes sense right?
.02
Unfortuanatly you have advertising supported sites, you have windows updates that SP5 comes out and it's 300 meg(that's somewhere close to the last SQL service pack i downloaded)
So really you come down to the issue of speed, maximum speed really is the best way to limit and sell usage.
Now what to do about people that use 100% of the bandwidth they have 100% of the time. This is a more difficult issue to find a fair resolution to.
BUT I've come to the conclusion that charges based upon total data downloaded does not work with our current internet.
just my
Those who can, do.
Those ISPs want to block or throttle connections to services that use a lot of bandwidth. That's like your city government responding to traffic by noticing that, say, 50% of the cars on the road are traveling to/from the beach, and then closing the beach in order to reduce traffic by 50%.
That's ridiculous, right? The roads are there to serve the people, not the other way around. If all those people want to go to the beach, then the roads just have to be built bigger to compensate.
The network doesn't need to be built to carry the theoretical peak traffic, just like not every road needs to be expanded to hold all the cars that might conceivably drive down it at once. But it should be built to carry the average amount of traffic, and -- here's the important part -- expanded to keep up with the average as usage patterns change.
The network is there to serve users, not the other way around. When users decide en masse that they want to start using higher-bandwidth applications like streaming video, the network needs to adapt to suit the new level of demand. ISPs who try to prevent customers from using any more bandwidth today than they did five years ago are being unreasonable.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Introduce data charging. People who want to download hundred of GBs of data can pay for it. If they only really do some e-mail and a bit of surfing....they will pay almost nothing. In New Zealand, we have data charging. I pay for 15GB / month and an additional $10 for each extra 5GB. Performance is excellent. I get what I pay for.
Only boring people are ever bored.
I didnt download the client, but use the web interface, and this
seems the norm amongst everyone I know. I was curious if there's
a web based P2P video streaming solution? This would surely help
alleviate some of the bandwidth issues to the BBC servers, though
I dont know how effective P2P would be for realtime video streams?
(Joost works because everyone is in sync)
I also hear the BBC is thinking of inserting cache servers on the
ISPs local network, though they're still not happy...
No Mate, It's the BBC's fault here. I've just changed ISP in the UK, and I had to look long and hard to find a provider that gave good service. Most ISP's in the UK are bucket-shops, offering insanely cheap broadband, but with the very clear T&C that they nearly ALL have small monthly bandwidth limits. ALL of them, more or less. The amount of people in the UK who don't understand anything about this is obviously in the millions, and until iPlayer turned up, nearly none of them were involved in p2p networks, none of them!
/. when it was released, but that was all discussing the question of DRM. I had no bloody idea it was a p2p client! None! And I'm not bad with this stuff, I'm a torrent - fricking - master otherwise. I only found out about it when my wife read out that iPlayer is in this weeks "What's Not Hot!" list in the Sunday Times style supplement, because "It clogs up your Internet connection."
Now, thanks to the Beeb, there are suddenly millions of grannies / football fans / Little Britainers who have no idea that their broadband connection is calmly sitting there chewing up all of their (typically miniscule) bandwidth allowance. A month later, their Broadband bill arrives, and it's tripled. Did the ISP warn them about their bandwidth? Yes! Does the beeb warn you when you install IPlayer? No!
I mean, I uninstalled it yesterday, mainly because I just didn't like it sitting there eating resources. In the space of a month I downloaded one episode of Mitchell & Web, and didn't bother watching it. I cannot remember IPlayer making it clear that the software would sit there eating bandwidth willy nilly during the install. I read all the bad press about Iplayer on
Now, I can't see why the ISP's would complain, they get to legitimately charge their punters penalty fees that are worth a bomb cumulatively.
Also, the BBC stink, they used to be the best tv company in the world, but are now groaning, zombie like with no talent analysts and and marteting scum. The four beeb channels in the UK are running endless little blips after programmes, reminding everyone out there that they can use iPlayer now. And I have heard the biggest Radio DJ in the UK (Chris Moyles, who is wierdly an odious sack of flatulent vomit) and he was ejaculating that he'd missed a favourite show but he "caught it on the iPlayer" really mate? And what corporate quota did you meet by spinning that little advert, you lying Jabba Shaped chew toy?
No, the beeb have released a dog in iPlayer, an absolute dog, and the word is out among the semi-hip that there is no good reason for having it installed on your system. The BBC should, really really should, stick to their threat and print warnings or disclaimers saying that you may not be able to afford to run their silly little app on certain connections, because in the UK, the list would be longer than every MS EULA ever stapled together, and it would include pretty much every broadband service on the island, because that is the model in play and you better believe the beeb have some responsibility for understanding that and launching THEIR product with that and their licence fee paying public in mind.
BBC, you listening? Don't get ahead of yourselves. Without Dr Who you are the 21st centuries ITV waiting to happen. Take the licence fee millions you get from every adult in Britain, and invest it in the cultural enrichment of what is now a bitter, prostituted, soulless glob of a country, not some half-baked nu-media nonsense like this...
You may not agree with what I say, but you should fight to the death to allow me to say it, by modding me up.
Interesting footnote to all the Americans ranting about Comcast on here. When the current UK cable service was launched in 1993/4, a nice man from Comcast came round and promised us unlimited forever, exponentially increasing bandwidth year on year, and fibre to the door within 5 years. Then they sold up to NTL, who continued same promises (except the fibre bit). Admittedly they could not have forseen the explosion in bandwidth demand then, but surely it's been obviously coming for the last few years. Easily long enough for them to have formulated a cost model and rolled it out. The ISP's have driven prices down to a level they can no longer support - that's nobody's fault but theirs surely.
Real happiness lies in the completion of work using your own brains and skills.
"Fact is, your a sad old man, who can't accept that TV has always been shit, the country has always been shit, and you have always been a dickless looser. Now get over it and stop crying like a baby."
What precisely would you know, you're in your teens? You have no frame of reference for anything, except maybe Leeds in the late nineties or something.
Look, I can't help you, you come on Slashdot spoiling for a fight, not able to understand what's being said, the buzzing in your ears, the confusion, the why oh why of being born in a place where no-one respects you for your wayward, haycart genius, your silly little joke of a moustache, your child-molesting uncles, your ego pulsing erratically like your little mouse of a dick every time you manage to get MTV on, or do you just bully your mum relentlessly by turning it on anyway? Nice place you've got is it? You get rid of that Transformers duvet yet?
And as for this country always being shit, well you know what you can do don't you? If you're not happy, leave. Fact is, you can't make it anywhere, which brings you... here
Or is it just that you really, really like Chris Moyles?
Kontiki? Sounds shite to me, I use Azureus, and ABC. And what the fuck is your problem? Are you getting wound up at everyone who is going to get stiffed on their broadband bill this month because of the BBC, because if that's true, you're an even bigger wanker than you sound. Read the post first next time, you scarey little gimp.
You may not agree with what I say, but you should fight to the death to allow me to say it, by modding me up.
True.
The Road analogy is very relevant.. remember when they used to call the Internet "The Information Superhighway"..
"Building up the infrastructure to fully satisfy the full demand of everyone is a bit ridiculous. The water utilities can't do that, the electric utilities can't do this, the telephone companies could never do this, etc."
And what do the Utilities do to help regulate the usage a customer imposes on the system? They bill per metered unit.
Roads aren't as directly tied to it, but there are things like gasoline taxes that help make up for that... one could argue that it's partially 'metered', since there are very people that use a road without paying for gasoline (and most of them don't need something as broad as a road).
If people are going to start treating their Internet as a utility.. which most people do imo, then it wouldn't be unusual to have it billed like one.
We're actually looking at implementing a metered scheme for one of our major co-location customers.. because they asked for it. They are expecting bursty traffic, and don't want to front with a constant 'unlimited' high-speed pipe. So we've started looking into it.
So.. why not a hybrid system.. 2 tiers:
1- Unlimited access.. at 4mb/512k (or whatever). Plenty enough to do pretty much anything.. heck.. put it lower if you want.
2- Metered access.. you get a 10mb (or even 100mb) pipe to your house.. the plan includes Plan1 @ 24x7 worth of transfer already.. but after that, it's $5/GB of transfer. The power users that want -FAST- pipes get it.. and if they really don't just sit around and torrent all day, run an FTP, or whatever, then they are fine.
Eh.. some ramblings.. it's what I do best.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
I don't understand the problem with fixing "infinite" plans. Why not use a plan structure like this?:
Full bandwidth until 10 GB limit.
128kbps after limit is reached.
Reset each month.
The numbers are just pulled out of the air. You'll want enough GB than most people will never hit it, making the plan infinite for all practical purposes. They can keep their computers turned on every day, all day. No surprises, no huge bill suddenly happening because they passed the cap. Even if someone get some malware maxing their connection. Customers might accept that the email-spamming virus "makes the Internet slow". They will NOT accept a $5000 bill for the bandwith used by said virus.
And after the cap, it's still as good as infinite. Email and browsing will function fine, just a little bit slow.
The only ones that will notice are heavy users. I'll happily pay a bit extra for the bandwidth I use. Just get a bigger plan with more GB before capped.
Such a plan could also easily be extended with off-peak rates. Usage between 2am-6am only count 50% towards your cap limit, for example.
Dead simple to implement, and would make perfect sense for everyone. No?
I lost my sig.
An industry where content or product (something to bring in customers) was WANTED?!
Reading this article I can't.
I sent an e-mail to my ISP (Shaw) asking for some clarification as to their rules on bandwidth caps, throttling, traffic shaping, etc, after I noticed that my ping times will shoot up and down dramatically if I leave a BT client with encryption running.
They sent me back an e-mail saying basically nothing. We've been going back and forth for 2 weeks now, with me receiving a "marketing-speak" e-mail and replying to it about every 2 or 3 days.
So far, their position seems to be "we would like to reserve the right to change the rules, whenever we feel like it, without telling you, and not even give you a straight answer as to what 'the rules' are."
Now, I do some downloading, but not a huge amount (maybe 20-25 gigs a month between me and my girlfriend). So as far as I can tell, what Shaw wants is:
1) To be able to bill me $40/month for using e-mail and a little web surfing
2) To never have to make any upgrades to their network, never mind their monopoly position
3) To be able to change the terms of my contract whenever it suits their purposes.
These guys have never played straight with their customers from day one, and now 'cause _they_ screwed up by making assumptions about what I would use my internet connection for, after they already offered me 'unlimited', they want us to eat the costs?
Fuck that. I'm no radical socialist, but there's a point where maybe we'd be better to nationalize the fuckers, and run it like a Crown Corporation, make it part of their mandate to get the fastest speed to people at the cheapest price, at a 'break-even or better' price structure.
There's gonna come a point where ISPs are more like water and sewage, i.e., "natural monopoly", and, in fact, competition in that situation is horribly inefficient.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".