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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.'"
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.
Because there is a difference between how much a simple home user is going to research an ISP and how much a corporate user hosting a website is expected to follow up and research into their contract.
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.
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)
But then who foots the bill for various things like all the ads that get displayed? It's not as simple as a water bill because a shower head manufacturer can't suddenly turn your water usage up in order to promote a new product.
Yeah, it's a bad example, but it's also a bad idea.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
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
People like predictability. The amount of water you use is fairly constant over time. Same with electricity, fluctuating with the seasons. Also, both of those are fairly mandatory for continued life, so a little bit of uncertainty will not convince a consumer to forgo either one. Bandwidth and cell phone minutes are different - you can live without them and your usage is harder to predict and more likely to fluctuate on a monthly basis, so you will be less willing to just let them bill you for your usage and pay the bill each month.
Some people don't understand the concept of 'bandwidth'. They don't realize that downloading that movie from bittorrent is much more data than pulling down one page of the web, except that one 'takes longer' than the other.
The rest of the bandwidth hogs point to the 'unlimited' marketing. Until the marketing of the service changes (and people are told about their limits and are capable of measuring them), you're still going to get grief.
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice
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?
Actually that's the point. There is no difference between downloadng a thousand websites and downloading a movie. Data is data. ISP's are going to need to realize that it doesn't matter what i am downloading it's still data.
the ISP's sold me bandwidth on false assumptions that I wouldn't use it all, all the time. If they didn't plan properly then that's their fault when i do start to use all the bandwidth all the time.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
That's a silly comparison. Nobody viewing normal websites keeps their pipe in constant use. Presumably you take some time to actually look at the sites you download. I don't think they'd be too happy if you ran an automated web crawler over your home circuit either.
ISP's are ultimately going to have to go to a model like cellphone contracts. 100 GB per month (or whatever). After that your bandwidth drops off or you pay for the overage, depending on your plan. Carry-over MB's and all. At least that's nominally fair. And maybe for those non-downloaders, there'd be a really low-cost, low volume plan.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
> Actually that's the point. There is no difference between downloadng a thousand websites and downloading a movie.
Unless the webpages are megabytes each there is. But that's not the point.
The point is the rate of information consumption. A large webpage (say, a few hundred k) will take longer to read than will the same amount of movie file. If the video rate is high enough, a few hundred kilobytes will pass in a few seconds or less.
The funny thing is that before the days of HD video, the ISPs sold their 'faster-than-dialup' service as 'fast' and 'unlimited'. I'm not sure why they put 'unlimited' in there, but they're paying for it now. I for one have no sympathy
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice
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
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.
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
Here's an illustration:
I have a house. I rent it out.
It doesn't matter if I rent it to someone with a family of 2, or a family of 5, it still costs me the same amount of annual maintenance, because I only have one house.
It doesn't matter if you're never home, or never leave, it still costs me the same amount of annual maintenance.
Line costs are like a house. You add up the capacity, you divide it by the amount of capacity you promise people, that's how many people you can support on your service. You divide your annual costs by that number, add a percentage for profit, and that is how you should price your services.
Now, as far as adding capacity, that's like building another house. It lets you get more customers, it doesn't make your existing customers more expensive to service.
The reason that the ISPs are having trouble is because their business model is based on fraud.
The fact that this fraud is normalized to the point that people consider it business as usual doesn't change the fact that they were fraudulently selling capacity they didn't have to deliver.
At the end of the day, they were renting the house out to several people at once, in the hopes that they would all be business travelers who are hardly ever home and there would always be an empty house when they needed it.
Now, all those business travelers are retiring all at once, and the fraud is being revealed.
This is the current ISPs business model. This is why they are throwing a fit.
When you get right down to it, it shouldn't be the responsibility of the public to eat the cost of their line improvements. They've been making large profits on false pretenses, and it should be those profits that are used to build the lines and rectify the situation.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Lets examine this argument a little more. If everyone paid for the full bandwidth they get (say a 3Mbps connection), and the ISP had to dedicate this much bandwidth per user, the consumer would have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for their connection. What are the going rates on a dedicated T1, I haven't looked at it lately, but it's not cheap by any means. 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. Imagine if we built roads to the specification that they had to carry the maximum possible number of vehicles in the area at once. We'd have 4 and 6 lane highways running through most every neighborhood. There's a reason that in events requiring an evacuation that roads crawl to a halt. The city and state oversubscribes them, and builds them to accept the average usage pattern, or more often they are built to accept the average peak usage. The same is true of ISPs. They don't build their network to hold the theoretical peak usage, but rather they build them to hold their average peak usage, or a little beyond that (monthly peak usage perhaps). The problem they are facing is that this average peak usage is increasing, however it isn't increasing anywhere near the point of the maximum theoretical peak usage possible.
Forcing networks to support the theoretical peak usage is silly, just as sill as expanding all interstates to 10 lanes in each direction so that traffic can flow more smoothly during evacuations etc. The cost of such plans is just too high compared to the gains we'd have by it. In fact, the cost of not oversubscribing bandwidth would price internet access to the point where most people might have a dialup connection. If you keep up the comparison, imagine if we kept going on this peak theoretical usage, and said that this peak theoretical usage had to work anywhere. Well most internet traffic is fairly local (same city, state, country, etc). What if ISPs were required to have the same bandwidth between chicago and new york as they have between chicago and shanghai. If you consider these massive links, we just wouldn't have anywhere near enough bandwidth.
Phil
How about charging the way you charge for normal utilities like electricity? You get a charge like,
$10 - base charge (infrastructure maintenance, etc.)
$2/GB - first 10GB
$1/GB - next 100GB
$0.75/GB - anything over 110GB usage
There ya go. Cheap for people using low bandwidth. Not exuberant for people using lots of bandwidth. Adjust prices accordingly per region and then don't bitch (either customer or ISP) that they don't have money for bandwidth.
Going back on topic, BBC *pays* for the use of bandwidth on their side. If ISP "can't cope with demand", it is not BBC's problem. And BBC should post blacklisting messages for customers connecting from ISPs that throttle their service, and suggest ones that do not. But then UK has one of the crappiest service from what I can read on forums like for EVE Online. Like people wanting to play a low bandwidth game like EVE can't connect because Tiscani choses to shaft them - http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=553090
Most customers don't have any idea how the internet works. And that's fine. It's a big complex system, and really they only need to know enough to get by. The problem is that ISPs can use that lack of understanding to abuse customers like this. It's what makes the net neutrality issue such a serious one.
Some people don't understand the concept of 'bandwidth'.
If their ISP is advertising "unlimited bandwidth" they shouldn't have to understand the concept of bandwith. All they should have to know is that they can have as much of it as they want.
The ISP, OTOH, doesn't understand the concept of "telling the truth."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
>Honestly, how is the ISP that's going to have any leverage over the BBC?
>Sure the ISP can send a bill.
A rhetorical question, or better still a "strawman" of your choosing that has nothing to do with the issue discussed.
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.
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.
The ISPs want to keep promising "unlimited" service and mislead the customer, and they want to do it by colluding on a single domain to bring them down... 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.
The ISPs then had a new product to sell - ADSL2, with speeds up to 8 Meg, and they advertised it like crazy and they promised Dad could read email, while mum was downloading showtunes from itunes, while Son was playing online games, and Daughter was downloading funny clips from youtube.
They wanted everyone to move to the new system and they deliberately hyped all the bandwidth hogging services as the reason you really should move to faster broadband.
Stupidly they fought for market share on price at the same time, some ISPs were offering free home broadband with your mobile phone price plan for example. At the time even pro consumer groups were saying the prices were too low and unsustainable.
So here we are a few years later, ISPs are shocked that people are using bandwith hogging services, they themselves promoted, and because of the price war, margins are too tight to widen pipes.
iPlayer has proven such a success there isn't a hope in hell of the BBC being made to stop the service and any money the BBC has to pay out, comes out of the licence fee, and that isn't going to happen either. The ISPs dug their own grave and some aren't going to dig their way out.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
Residential ISPs (at least in the US) typically oversell like there's no tomorrow, sometimes block ports to force you to use their 'business' service to say...run an HTTP server without the tacky port number at the end of the URL. 'Business' lines usually aren't oversold and go down about as often as residential ISPs upgrade their infrastructure, usually don't block ports, and tend to have better upstream.
Think of it as buying from a pharmacist instead of a dealer.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
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.
Sounds like my local gym membership :-) Apart from in January.
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.
If people weren't using it, then they wouldn't pay $1 more for 15 Mbps over 1 Mbps. Why are they offering such high speed packages? Because they know people want it. They are selling something they know people want, yet they aren't able to deliver. It hasn't "snuck" up on them. The ISPs have been steadily increasing their package speeds. If they haven't been increasing their core at the same rate (and they haven't) then it is their own fault, and not because of any unexpected demand. It may be that in the post 2000 years spending on the core has decreased while desire for revenue (sell higher priced packages) has increased. But just because they haven't been doing what they know is technically required for a stable network doesn't mean they didn't see it coming or excuse them when the network approaches unusability under increased demand. If the packages don't make sense financially, they shouldn't have offered them.
And start paying a lot closer to what dedicated bandwidth costs businesses today.
You talked about T1 pricing. One reason that's an issue is because of local loops. The phone company charges anywhere from $100 to $300 (or more) just to connect one end to the other. That's the greatest cost for a T1. Then add the increased support. In reality, the data flowing over the wire is almost free. It's getting the dedicated wires to the ISP and the increased level of service (ever have a phone company tech spend 20 hours at your home for a single 1.5Mbps DSL connection? I've had it with a T1, and it's not that uncommon when there are minor intermittent issues). The ISPs saw this coming. They charged more where they could, paid less where they could, and there is a collision happening between the two.
Learn to love Alaska
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.