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.'"

Comments

Amen

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Amen

[ari_j]

The good thing is that smart lawyer tricks trump the stupid kind. If you can show damages due to the false advertising, go ahead and sue. If you can only show a few dollars of damages, get a class action going. Our legal system may permit a certain level of litigiousness, but it's also the necessary check and balance to our capitalist economy.

Re:Amen

[fm6]

I agree that it's dishonest to advertise a service as "unlimited" when it's not. Not only should they admit that they impose limits, they should be required to specify what the limits are.

But let's be honest here. For years now, geeks have been pretending that bandwidth is an unlimited resource. We've had huge ranting flamefests on Slashdot whenever anybody suggests that you should pay a per-packet charge for your data, or that you be restricted for re-selling your packets. That's not the only reason ISPs have to pretend that they're selling unlimited flat-rate access, but it's a big one.

Let's examine the choices here:

• Keep the flat fee structure, and force ISPs to build up so they can actually support all the bandwidth people are trying to squeeze out of it. That's expensive, and would price access out of a lot of user's reach. It's also difficult to specify, since it's a moving target.

  And don't say, "they can just build up so that there's enough bandwidth in case everybody wants to use the system at once." No telecom network operates on that basis. If it were feasible, the landline phone system wouldn't crash every time there's a natural disaster and everybody runs to the phone to see if Aunt Bee is OK.
  

• Require ISP to specify caps and fees for being allowed to exceed them. That's probably the most practical approach, and certainly one most users could live with. But as I said, geeks have always resisted this model.
  
• Meter bandwidth and charge per-packet. Same problem.
  
• Make content providers pay for the extra cost of serving their high-bandwidth applications. That's what the ISPs are pushing for, but it would destroy the "everybody's a publisher" model that's made the internet so popular.
  
• Muddle along as we have been, with deliberately obfuscated usage rules that work OK for most people. Not my first choice, but probably what we'll end up doing.
  

Re:Common Sense is asking too much...

[Bryansix]

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.

Marketing isn't the problem

[Qwerpafw]

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.

Re:Marketing isn't the problem

[FudRucker]

RE:["The [insert - any website] 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."]

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...

Re:Marketing isn't the problem

[Danse]

I think you are missing that the iPlayer can work in a P2P mode, so the ISPs claim that the BBC does not pay its fair share (because it merely seeds the downloads). If the BBC is paying for the data that it is uploading, then it is paying its fair share. The rest of the bandwidth use is customers uploading and downloading data with each other, which they also pay for via their ISP fees. If those fees don't cover the cost of the bandwidth, then that is the fault of the ISP, not the BBC. ISPs keep promising the world to their customers, only to complain when they actually try to make use of all that "unlimited" downloading speed the ISP told them they were getting.

Re:Marketing isn't the problem

[POPE Mad Mitch]

Ah this version of the story is missing the really juicy part that is mentioned in other related stories,

And that is that the BBC effectively threatened to put out of buisness any ISP that dares to try to throttle its iPlayer service by 'naming and shaming' any that do, and suggesting that all other content providers do the same.

I imagine that having trailers appear on bbc tv saying "and you can also watch this episode again via iPlayer (except on the following ISPs)" is going to be pretty damaging to business.

Why isn't it treated lake any other utility?

[nobodyman]

I like this quote:

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...

Absolutely right. I've often wondered why we don't treat internet service like any other utility. If I use more water, I get a larger water bill. Same goes for electricity. Why don't we do the same thing for ISP's? A lot of people bristle at the idea of this, but I kindof like it. That way people that only use the internet for email and light web surfing are charged less than people who troll Youtube all day.

Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility?

[Kickersny.com]

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.

Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility?

[SwordsmanLuke]

people that only use the internet for email and light web surfing are charged less than people who troll Youtube all day. Exactly. This is probably why ISPs have not yet adopted a pay as you go approach. I used to work for a webhosting company and we oversold our service by about 80% (e.g. we only had 20% of the total advertised capacity) but that was okay, because 90% of our customers only used 5% of their purchased package (of course, the other 10% tried to use 150% and complained when their site went down after burning through their alloted bandwidth). If the ISP business is anything like it, they're making money like mad on the e-mail only crowd. They're not going to be happy about killing that golden goose, even if they get to charge the heavy users more.

Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility?

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility?

[m.ducharme]

The really crazy thing is...this idea is implemented by my provider, and I for one think it works well. My (smallish) Canadian cable provider offers three or four packages, each with different bandwidth limits. The lowest offers 1mbps/320kbps, for about the same price as dial-up. The highest offers 5Mbps/640kbps (I know, not great, but the best we have). All packages have unlimited up/download volumes. Everything's spelled out nice and clearly on their website, no tricks, and they have in me a brand-loyal customer. Why can't other ISPs do this?

Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility?

[philipgar]

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

Yeah, right...

[spaceyhackerlady]

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

"Arggh, a killer app! Kill it!"

[WombatDeath]

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.

New Google App Engine Proxy Saves British ISPs

[Saint Aardvark]

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.

Re:Common Sense is asking too much...

[peragrin]

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.

Re:Common Sense is asking too much...

[contrapunctus]

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. Do you advertise "unlimited"? If so you eat it. If you advertise correctly then your clients know what to expect.

Because it sucks for entertainment.

[maillemaker]

Home internet service is, for me, an entertainment service.

I would /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.

Internet access is flat-rate or nothing for me.

peak phone usage

[CustomDesigned]

You don't have to talk slower, but you *do* get "All circuits are busy, please try later." If QoS was implemented, then VoIP (and live video) connections would have a "guarantee bandwidth" tag that would block the connection until sufficient bandwidth was available, and then reserve the bandwidth for the remainder of the connection. Bittorrent connections would have an "as available" tag to minimize cost.

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.

Re:Common Sense is asking too much...

[magarity]

I use between 15GB and 100GB of "bandwidth" per month. Storage? zilch.
 
Maybe *you* aren't using the storage yourself but it takes a lot of space on the government's servers to index and cross reference your 100GB of browsing habits.

The irony

[Alioth]

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?

Re:Common Sense is asking too much...

[gnuman99]

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

Haven't we been here before?

[tacokill]

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.