Slashdot Mirror
BBC's iPlayer Chief Pushes Tiered Charging For ISPs
rs232 writes with a link to a story at The Register which begins: "The executive in charge of the BBC iPlayer has suggested that internet users could be charged £10 per month extra on their broadband bill for higher quality streaming." The article suggests (perhaps optimistically) that "after years of selling consumers pipes, not what they carry, [tiered, site-specific pricing] would be tough to pull off."
The bbc is joking what is next a net fee like the tv one?
Let me get this right. I pay my TV licence which is supposed to give me access to the BBC's content but they now feel I should pay out extra for something I've already paid for?
I've used iPlayer like 3 times in my life. I shouldn't have to pay anything extra for it and certainly not £10 per month for something I rarely use. It'd be more cost effective to buy the content in DVD format.
If the BBC can't afford to do something with the licence fee then don't do it.
it's more of that stupid notion that the ISPs are trying to get away with double-dipping their customers.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Cellular providers are already being paid to deliver data. Now they are saying "Pay us extra and we won't throttle iPlayer." What's next? "Pay us extra and we won't throttle YouTube"?
Net neutrality is important to all of us. Any "provider" who can't deliver the data should be allowed to quietly go out of business.
E
Sounds like the ISPs over on that side of the pond are are trying to claim the "unlimited" broadband package they sold you isn't really.
Old news here.
I work for an ISP/Telco. A few years ago this whole "access Internet from your phone" was just coming and GPRS costs were crazy. At that point we made quite a few studies that basically came to the effect of "in ISP world, with DSL, cable etc, people are already used to flat rate - you can't change that. In mobile, folks are still used to idea of different price for different services - case in point text messages".
Well, we missed the boat on that one (technology was there - all traffic goes through GGSN and they supported tying a Layer 4/7 switch to a accounting server). There were some ideas proposed, like concepts of "sponsored links" where if you normally paid X amount per megabyte some advertiser could perhaps do it for you and so on.
We missed the boat on that one, and now everyone is in the "flat until X MB (where X can be infinite), then extra bytes cost extra from that point on" model - even in the Internet accessed from mobile phone. In regular ISP world it's a doomed proposition since we have had 10-15 years of flat rate broadband now.
There's just *no* way this is going to happen anymore. Sure, business customers might be interested (and are) paying for e.g. guaranteed delivery for their internal VoIP traffic and guaranteed QoS, but it's just not going to fly for average consumer. Some "added value" services might be in there (stuff like, say, some freebies at iTunes), but QoS-related stuff for *generic Internet service* is not going to be one of them.
By doing this the BBC would opt to become one of the first (and largest) players in European tiered-web. The control that they would command could possibly turn British ISPs into the broadcast stations of the days of old. I'm sure they would reserve the right to not offer their services to ISPs that didn't pay-up from increased rates.
I think the idea is that you'd pay your ISP more to cover their costs of carrying iPlayer traffic. Cue proxy servers in 3, 2, 1...
Why don't they use BitTorrent or similar p2p networks to distribute their files? Sure, it might be a bit more difficult for live-streaming, but most content is not live content* and p2p networks have shown to be a good alternative to regular Server-Client-downloads.
(* I don't know about you guys, but hate anyone trying to force me to watch some tv show at a specific time. I want to watch what I want, when I want. I believe this is true for most people and most content).
Good.
I want to be in charge of the QOS I receive. I disapprove of any model in which the content provider pays the ISP for more QOS. That leads to a Disney and Coca-Cola Internet.
The consumer should be the one to choose (and pay) for QOS. And payment should be to the ISP, not the content provider, which would end up as a kickback to the content provider's ISP.
Only in this way can we hope to ensure that the Internet is not filtered by the content providers with the largest pockets, and by the ISPs themselves.
I don't get what the big change is? My ISP already offers several tiers of service for Internet. I can pay $30/month for 256 Kbps; $40/month for 5 Mbps; $51/month for 10 Mbp; $100/month for 25 Mbps. The also screw you by making you pay for 'PowerBoost(TM)' which is $2.95, and allows you to download a "10 MB file in 8 seconds" with the 10 Mbps plan. Which is a real scam as my maths tell me that's what I should be getting with the plan anyways. I don't have it, but maybe that's why my 10 Mbps service seems throttled to 118 KBps, and when i tried to downgrade to a '5 Mbps plan' I went down to around 60KBps. Also when they launched their own Internet phone service my Vonage stopped working, they said I needed another option for $5 to 'speed up net phone service'.
I'm not going to pay $10 more a month for what I already have just because someone wants more money. But... if the BBC made their content such high quality that my 10Mbps connection wasn't enough to stream from their site, then maybe I'd consider upgrading to a 20Mbps plan. Don't offer me what I already have and pretend it's suddenly worth more - offer me something better, and then maybe I'll buy it.
the same cable companies that are pushing for tiered pricing start pulling stunts like packaging channels instead of allowing us Ala carte pricing, so we only get the channels we want. Wait, what? They what?
If $ISP cannot profitably sell $x mbit/s at $y dollars/month they need to either increase $y or decrease $x. It doesn't cost anyone more to deliver traffic from the BBC than anywhere else (peering ratios/contracts aside). It sounds like the problem is that average people are ... *gasp* ... actually using their internet connection for more than e-mail and web surfing and the bandwidth:customer ratios are no longer extremely in the ISPs favor.
ISPs should instead be looking at ways they can reduce their costs while providing better service to their customers, such as a peering arrangements with the likes of YouTube, BBC, etc. or a local appliance that serves up the most bandwidth expensive content (you know, like any content delivery network does).
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
"shove it"
Read radical news here
In the UK, speed based tiering is all but dead. Now you get whatever speed your line can support (up to 8Mbps or 24Mbps - depending on provider), and the tiering is based on download caps (5Gb, 20Gb, 100Gb, uncapped is typical), after which they either throttle you to dialup speeds, charge you per gigabyte, or in the case of the ISP I am with, do nothing, but if you're over a few months in a row they phone you up and request that you upgrade to the next tier if you want continued service.
Considering QoS...an ISP can only guarantee QoS to any practical degree in their own network.
The whole point of term "Internet-based service" is the fact that it's accessed through a mystical cloud of multiple networks held together by glue, duct tape, BGP and peering agreements. Accessing Slashdot (for me) goes through four AS numbers (try in Linux traceroute with the -A option). So while all those ISPs have been able to agree to exchange bits either in peering or customer/provider model, there's no practical way that I could negotiate a guaranteed access quality to slashdot.org across all those various organizations at any practical cost...
BBC *is* a special case that topologically they have their own network which is able to peer with other ISPs at lot of places (at least if you are either in US or UK) so they might be able to wrangle deals with directly-connected ISPs to provide some QoS to their peering point. As their customer-base would be UK license payers it might, technically, work.
Whether anyone is actually willing to pay extra for that...I seriously doubt it.
Except for mayby some TV games, there is no need for higher quality.
TV is one-way so just buffer more.
Preferably download it all before you start to watch it (that's what mimms is for).
Would you rather pay 10pount/year or watch the stream delayed an extra second?
This is the new motto for those who have the consumer's interests by the balls. "Oh, so you like this content? Well guess what? You're REALLY going to pay for it now." Things they were already making a profit on they're now going to squeeze further so we become even poorer for the same crappy programming.
This whole scheme is absurd. They can *already* charge us more for higher bandwidth streams. It's called PASSWORD PROTECTION you mopes. It's called ENCRYPTION. DRM. It's not impossible to keep certain media off-limits except for those who pay. This whole idea is designed to put billing and access control in the hands of the ISPs while the BBC reaps the profits.
And what do we, the consumer, get in the end? Fucked. They shove this bullshit down our throats and we gobble it all up. Here, take my money so I can get another copy of the same thing on another medium in another format. It's all our fault... We just keep moving, buying the same crap, feeding the system, letting it grow larger and control our lives some more.
Hopefully people will run out of money before they run out of guts.
Wait a minute... I already pay more per month than my neighbor, so I will have a faster internet connection. Faster for EVERYTHING. Now the ISPs are going to ask me to pay even more, so that certain selected (by them, not me) content will be supposedly faster? Yeah, good luck selling that one...
can only guarantee QoS to any practical degree
The only practical degree they need to guarantee is "we won't cripple your data transfers". Given the historical consistency of ISPs dragging their feet on upgrading their networks (in the US anyway, is it any different over in the UK?) that's almost certainly the guarantee they're offering, since unlike the consumer side of "up-tos" and "best-cases" it's unlikely that the BBC and other companies would allow them to oversell these guarantees.
The funniest thing about the above comment is that (in Australia at least), the mobile phone plans are heading towards pay $x for $y worth of credit (eg $39 for $150 worth of usage). This is more along the lines of the internet plans rather then the traditional mobile plans.
(Mobile data can be covered by these plans but sometimes is not and the rates are usually higher then the normal plans...)
Seems to me that the BBC has become lazy and reliant on broadcast fees and thinks it's everybody's job but theirs to figure out their business model.
If you can't figure out how to stream megabit streams profitably, then don't stream them. Don't try to mess up the Internet just because you don't have a business model.
1) they have their head up their asses
2) they mumble under their breaths what the BNP says aloud.
I find it unusual you are in favor of this then as what is being suggest is that they don't charge you based on connection quality/speed, but on what content you are accessing.
I'm afraid I don't understand. Most broadband companies where I live offer tiered service already with slower speeds costing less and higher speeds costing more. Or is that not the case in the U.K.? If no, why are they treating this like it's some brand-new idea?
Why do companies and governments not see that cheap, plentiful broadband is the only way to grow Internet adoption and the online industry as a whole? Especially now that the worldwide economy is in the shitter, the information age is poised to drag us out of it, if only self-serving companies and conrgresscritters wouldn't stifle progress to make their own quick buck.
When the Internet was this shiny new thing, large companies didn't want anything to do with it. The first ISPs started out as ma-and-pop operations because big communications companies thought it was a silly idea to connect two consumer's computers together over some distance. Remember that? The telcos were the ones that fought the hardest because they hated having dialup modems on their voice network. Now that the Internet is clearly here to stay, everyone with a bit of power and/or money wants their own slice of the pie and in the process make it more costly, more inconvenient, less open, and overall less beneficial to the average individual.
I sincerely hope you were joking:
All VISA cards start with 4.
All Mastercards start with 51, 52, 53, 54, or 55.
Don't believe me? Take a look in your wallet. :)
Thus, iCONICA, if you just shared the last 12 digits of your Mastercard, you now have cut down the search space of your password to 500 numbers. Moreover, credit card digits have to conform to a checksum (double every other digit + add them all up, must be 0 mod 10.) Thus, I'd estimate we could guess your card within 10 unique numbers, around 100 if VISA. There are ways of getting around the "security digits" and expiration date...
Short story is, don't share your credit card number. Even as a joke.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
In the late 1990s, one would have the same about Americans paying for bottled water, but now people seem to be happy to pay $2/L for bottled water - even when the same quantity of soft drinks are offered for sale at the same location for $1.50!
If an ISP were to force the issue with access to a popular website in an area where customers have no competing ISPs, they will probably get away with it.
All it takes is a precedent - we need to fight this type of anti-public price gouging now, before it gains a foothold!
That leads only to pay twice for something that should just exist.
You already pay for that QoS and that Bandwidth.
If people did measurements of the offered QoS/Bandwidth some ISP would be forced to close down...
To my eyes, blurry as they may be for this hour, the quote appears to suggest that media streams may be delivered in varying qualities, dependent upon the user's available bandwidth. It does not seem to suggest that users should pay "extra" fees on top of their standard ISP charges to watch higher quality media, as some here seem to have interpreted.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
it's the taking apart that counts
I understand the QOS issue. With a packet network such as the Internet, you cannot guarantee QOS. All you can do is promise to prioritize packets, and provide a certain bandwidth within the network that you control. Out in the cloud, one can try to set up special arrangements, but as you know, nothing is for sure. One can always lose or delay a packet if traffic is heavy.
Thus, there really isn't a technical solution beyond what IP6 provides - which is not a guarantee.
What I am saying is only that I do not want QOS to be managed primarily by ISPs who deal with the deep pockets. I want the ISPs instead to attempt to treat each packet without regard to where it is from, and deal with the QOS service issue by providing enough bandwidth to satisfy their customers, without playing favorites.
At the consumer endpoint, the consumer should have the ability to improve performance by buying more bandwidth, but you are right, that if there is insufficient bandwidth at some point along the way the traffic will be choked. But if that occurs, I want it to occur evenly and fairly to all of the customers of the ISP that is causing the choking. No favorites.
That is the only way that we will ensure that players with big wallets will not hog the Internet and cause response time for other sites (perhaps ones with more open content) to be accessible.
I see the confusion. Their proposal sounds fair on the surface, but consider the ramification: they are trying to establish and end to end performance level based on their relationship with their ISP (the provider that connects the BBC network to the rest of the Internet). I feel that packets should not be prioritized based on who sent them. That is what they are trying to do, even though their purpose if reasonable. It sets a bad precedent. Imagine if Disney did the same thing: then Disney's ISP would start to give higher priority to Disney high QOS packets, OVER that given to other (non-Disney) sites. Very, very bad precedent.
You are right, but the reason is subtle. The key is to require that ISPs cannot prioritize based on sender. All senders (and receivers) should be treated equally. Then, if QOS is not sufficient, the ISP's media customers will all be equally affected. With such a policy, yes, we would ultimately be paying for the QOS because the cost would propagate to the endpoints.
Very True. Instead of charging you £10 a month for broadband, the BBC should instead be charging maybe £200 a month for selfish people who insist on having their programs delivered through the horrendously expensive terrestrial TV system?
But let's face it; Bureaucrats see it as their job to think of new ways to through levies, fees, taxes and charges at customers.
I'll back tiered charging when you back tiered (monthly) rebates from ISPs who slowly take away benefits like usenet, the ability to run your own ports, etc. Looking at you, Comcast.
In the UK [...] the tiering is based on download caps (5Gb, 20Gb, 100Gb, uncapped is typical)
Most UK ADSL accounts are capped.
working for a UK ISP i can guarantee that you will not see more then 8Mbps anytime soon in 90% of cases.
BT's exchanges wont let you go any faster, and those exchanges are what most ISP's are using (though not always directly), and the upgrades are 'ongoing' to the point that there is no difference in the setup of the exchange for 8, 16, 24Mbps, whatever links (there are settings for below 8Mbps).
in the rare case where you actually get what your paying for, its probably one of the new & fancy fibre links from virgin.
I take it you're Canadian? What you are describing sounds alot like Shaw's plans, with a few exceptions. First off PowerBoost is free with the 10mbps and 25mmbps plans, and what it does is double your connection, not simple raise it to 10mbps. Second your point about VoIP is correct, is it any coincidence that shaw offers their own VoIP plans? Anyways your slow connection is likely just the sites your pulling from.
Why do companies and governments not see that cheap, plentiful broadband is the only way to grow Internet adoption and the online industry as a whole? Especially now that the worldwide economy is in the shitter, the information age is poised to drag us out of it, if only self-serving companies and conrgresscritters wouldn't stifle progress to make their own quick buck.
Apparently you've missed the news. The "information age" was stifled a long time ago, and its remains expelled from its gestation chamber in a dead bloody mess.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
obama has all of us by the balls and we will pay through the nose for anything we need in life.
This is rather funny.
If someone came to abduct me and subject me to the horrors of my every need being catered to for the rest of my life they wouldn't need a gun or knife to make me go : )
If they were coming to abduct me and make me empty my account so they could buy weapons and drilling equipment, however, i'd take as many of them with me as possible.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You *can* guarantee QoS as an ISP/NSP if you control almost all of the connectivity end to end. Case in point: Comcast's IBONE network. They're slowly moving away from using Tier 1/2 providers for a lot of traffic and pushing those packets across their own nationwide network.
"Tiered Internet" in this case is not talking about speed, it's talking about content. At the moment, you pay for the connection between you and your ISP, in most places. With a better connection offering better speeds. A "tiered internet" would be if you want to watch YouTube, $5 is added to your bill, or a $2 surcharge for using Google, or an extra $20 to use BitTorrent, etc. It's content based filtering. So you might have like a 25Mb/s line, but not access to the content that'd utilize it. Kind of like the way (at least in the US) cell phone providers charge you separately for text messaging, voice calls, picture messaging, etc.
Net Neutrality is a movement to try to prevent this, and keep the internet the way it is, where all bits are (more or less) equal.
This could be the end of the free Internet in the UK (something the government has been pushing for a while now). You would buy packages of sites (IP addresses) you can access rather than a genuine Internet connection.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Most of the Virgin connections are not fibre for the last mile, they're the same old coax to the house, with a fibre backbone. That said, I still get 10Mb/s from mine (1.2MB/s sustained transfers, so 9.6Mb/s + protocol overhead).
I'm visiting my mother over Christmas. Unlike me, she is a BBC license payer[1], but because she lives out in the country and can only get a 512Kb/s connection, she can't watch streamed iplayer content because it doesn't buffer adequately and so pauses every minute or so.
[1] I used to be, but I stopped when they introduced MS DRM for the iPlayer. I have no desire for my money to be spent helping Microsoft extend their monopoly into a new market. I will start paying it again when they introduce DRM-free downloads.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The BBC is only thinking about this because it's *finally* dawned on them how much the bandwidth is going to cost them (via Siemens).
Why not shunt the cost onto the monkeys watching the tubes?
Yes, I helped build the infrastructure for that iPlayer disaster. No it is not good in any way, shape or form.
Seriously, they either need to let in 3rd parties or get the &!*% out of my internets.
I am getting pissed off severely with their greed and stupidity.
"oh hur we are the boss, we can do anything we like because we are total prats"
SCREW THEM.
Youtube is better. Also, the BBC has a blatent left-wing political stance. It's ok for a normal media corporation to be politically biased because you can just turn over, but a taxpayer funded one should be a little more balanced. Yes you can turn the BBC over, but you still have to support them financially whether you watch BBC channels or not. I've nothing against people who are left of centre, I just dont like paying the BBC if they are not being even-sided. I also don't see the point in funding the BBC when the Internet has brought us plenty of alternatives. If it isn't scrapped then it should be an optional subscription like virgin or sky that you only pay for if you use it.
Comcast screws with Voip traffic. I switched from comcast to DSL and my Voip service quality improved dramatically.
Comcast induces a lot of jitter and other problems because they increased the buffer times in the modems. Increasing this time will completely screw with Voip service. When you get their voip service the modem is different and designed to not do that to the voip ports.. oh but your old voip service will not work as they are hogging those ports for your ip address.
I used to work at Comcast, I talked to several of the cablemodem engineers about my voip problems when I worked there, I was told that their changes bork voip. They can reconfigure your modem to act differently, but hey, they can charge you $5.00 a month for that "special" config.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Funny, my router says different, as do online speed tests. ADSL distribution isn't great in this country, but there are large urban areas where speeds of 16meg+ are viable.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Wow, you must have caught a mod on a bad day. Not to worry, some people forget that troll != do not agree with.
I'd pay for better online access to the bbc, but then I use the bbc extensively for my news provision and radio entertainment, so I don't mind paying extra. I don't own a TV, so don't pay a tv license fee. Thats not the BBCs fault, its the endless stream of adverts and low quality programming on most other channels that puts me off. The way the law is, if I don't have a TV, I don't need a license to access bbc content. Is this right? Not sure, but its legal.
Besides which, I find that iPlayer, with its inherent ability to let me pick and choose viewing times, it better than watching the bbc on a normal tv anyway.
I think sometimes people forget that the internet isn't an all you can eat buffet. Bizarrely its the ISPs that promoted this 'everything on the net for a fixed monthly fee' thing. I wondered how long it would last in the face of the online media 'revolution'. Seems the answer was not long at all.
I cannot see how this was modded as 'insightful'.
The suggestion, as I read it, is that the BBC should increase the quality and resolution of its output at the expense of the UK TV licence payer, so it takes more bandwidth. This will mean it will not download at a reasonable rate unless ISP suppliers worldwide sell the viewers an expanded service for which it can charge.
None of your ten dollars to your ISP gets back to the BBC. I do not see it as the duty of the BBC to provide future revenue for your ISP. People want internet access because there is something worthwhile to look at. It is not a good business plan to punish the BBC and other providers of content that people want to download, or to artificially inflate the volume of internet traffic so the ISPs can provide a new tier of service.
The BBC needs an income that is independent of the UK government. The current TV licence scheme is bizarre and increasingly unenforceable with USB TV decoders and such. I don't see how they can raise revenue from the Internet, which has always been the land of "do-as-you-please". There ought to be some payback for somewhere for providing worthwhile content. But this..? This may have been posted think in all good faith, but from the UK it reads like a troll. Really.
Other than news channels and sports broadcasts there are very few programs which need to be live streams. Even the news channels are suspect as they often report the same news from this morning with 'live interviews' later in the day.
Seems to me we could probably do without live streams all-together for the public.... let the sports bars host live events using a satellite feed or some such for the sports junkies (it's more fun in a group at a bar anyways) - and let the news junkies get their fix from RSS feeds of actual news rather than the filler content that gets passed off as news.
Now that that is all cleared up, everyone can just subscribe to the content they want and depending on what they are willing to pay for bandwidth wise, they can watch the content when it gets downloaded at whatever speed they have. With an always on internet connection at home, people should be able to queue up a few shows to watch in the evening and come home after work to find their shows waiting for them.
So where is this service?
Personally I roll my own using Boxee and an RSS download setup but of course my content is limited to what is available online (YMMV depending on your ethics).
For live TV like sports and news I have an OTA connection with an HMDI HD receiver... which really fills in the gap IMHO (but may not work well in a large city where OTA signals get lost).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Is it just being realistic? Here in the UK, ISPs have been selling flat-rate "up to 8MB" broadband for some time now, but glossing over the very high contention ratios they've been using (and getting away with so far, because the average user doesn't currently want anything like 8MB/s of data transfer).
With the rise of streaming, real-time media — and the BBC's iPlayer has been a great success story over here — the assumption that a large group of users only ever sends a few e-mails and shops at Amazon is becoming less valid. While quite a few people have visited YouTube and the like and watched a five minute clip of something, that's a long way from a service that offers full-length, full-quality downloads of major programs and advertises this fact prominently on several major TV stations.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the ISPs don't have the bandwidth they've sold if everyone wants to use it, any more than the banks had the money they were selling. Some sort of change in pricing is inevitable. One way or another, those who have been doing very well out of the current flat-rate deals are going to be the ones who lose out, because they are getting things disproportionately cheap right now.
Personally, I don't like the filtering by source/destination idea. It sounds like something that will attack the openness that has made the Internet such a success. I'd rather go back to some sort of metred use policy, perhaps with tiered flat rate bundles for a bit of predictability for low/average users (so that up to x MB/month is a standard rate, up to y MB/month is another standard rate, and after that it's metred or something). This model seems to work fairly well for the mobile phone industry, and the pricing is transparent and sustainable.
But whether it's done by bandwidth, web sites visited, protocols used, or what postcode you live in, anyone who has been happily streaming tens of gigabytes per month of downloads on their flat rate plan and thinks an extra 10 pounds a month is excessive is just deluding themselves. The bandwidth simply isn't there to support everyone doing that, and when commodities are scarce, prices go up.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Since 2006, the GEZ of Germany (Germany version of BBC) already charges everyone 5.90 Euro for having a computer or mobile phone with the -capability- of connecting to the Internet.
This is because you could connect to the Internet and watch some of the (worthless) shows they produce. Of course, they could easily restrict access to the websites to the people who have TV licenses (each has a license number, not hard to do!), but that would defeat the purpose of extorting revenue from -everyone- in the country.
So, if yo have a computer or a (GPRS/EDGE/3G) phone in Germany. You must pay every month. They collect 7 BILLION Euros a year. No one really knows what they do with it or how much the people who work for them get paid, as it isn't public information at all. But I expect they probably put some of the 6 million quid BBC presenter's salaries to shame (because they produce less shows, and collect 2x more revenue).
The only excemption is if you are -already- paying for a TV or radio license, then "The Internet" is included.
But essentially, now everyone who doesn't have a TV and doesn't want one in Germany (because it is rubbish!) still has to pay the license fee for it.
So, be glad you are in the UK. Germany is worse.
Alternatively you could just get Be Unlimited, which gives you up to 24mb/s and NO CAP for £18 a month. Why anybody uses anything else I have no idea.
Sam
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
Yup, Shaw it is. Yeah I didn't read the small print about PowerBoost being free on my plan. As for my download speeds its not the source, its definitely a shaw cap. Its a constant speed I see all the time. It doesn't matter if its a large Microsoft Binary, a download from my office which is also downtown, or from a friend with the same plan three blocks away(I actually get the lower 60KBps rate at the time in that case, as that's the capped upload speed). Even with shaws own speed test I get these rates. As I mentioned I downgraded and the cap was cut in half. When ever I call and complain, they say "download speeds are "up to 10Mbps'".
But where I am if your in a condo Shaw know they have you by the balls. The utter refuse to take responsibility for any of their cable problems. I foolishly have the Canucks PPV package and with every second game something goes wrong. Just last night it cut out for ten minutes and we missed the first goal. And then when it came back it wasn't the 'Commercial free PPV' feed, but rather just the sportnet feed with commercials from Ottawa. Shaws answer, "The problem was with the Canucks and not us, we are not responsible". Only once have I got any sort of programming credit this year, $3, when the entire first period was off air. Which is an odd amount as its not even 1/3 of the $16 cost of the PPV.
Well it does seam as if something is wrong with your connection, can;t say that about mine though. I often get upto 25mbps with the PowerBoost even though it should only be 20mbps.
ok, I did not finish the article before this came to mind. BIG MEDIA MOGUL Buys several media cache(type) servers and places them behind the top 10(20) major ISP's and have the media cached on those servers. Then when a person goes to watch/listen content it's streamed from their intranet rather than directly from the BBC's core streaming servers and if it's a live feed the BBC actually saves money on bandwidth as they will only be streaming to fewer sources. Am I the only person that see's how this will save everyone money ?
What is almost criminal is that the phone worked perfectly fine, up to the very month that they rolled out their own phone service. My main problem is I live in a condo where my only TV option is the company I have. Because of bundled pricing it doesn't make sense for me to go with an alternate Internet service as it will cost me $10 more a month for a 'slower' service.
As was mentioned earlier why don't ISPs setup multicast repeaters at the POP. Christ we have the technology now to relay this high bandwidth information so that it potential will only affect the last mile - why dont we use it?
BT are rolling out ADSL2+ slowly and it's already in major cities. These things take time.
If you think virgin media is actually fiber I've got a bridge to sell you.
Because they're horribly oversubscribed. Because they have no decent support. Because they have the audacity to actually charge *per month* for IP addresses so to replicate my current 16 IPs would jack the price up to £42 per month (making them simultaneously the most expensive and cheapest ISP.. a neat trick).
And your £18 a month contract is a minimum 12 months. Costly when you want to change, or even just move house. Many, like myself, won't even consider such a contract.
To get decent, reliable broadband costs money.. Or you can go cheap and get an ISP that slows down to 1/10th of their maximum speed at what they laughingly call 'off-peak'.
Maybe because ADSL2 won't help you unless you live next-door to the exchange? Perhaps because LLU ISPs (such as Be) tend to pick profitable urban exchanges rather than where everyone else lives?
Unfortunately, the reality is that the ISPs don't have the bandwidth they've sold if everyone wants to use it, any more than the banks had the money they were selling. Some sort of change in pricing is inevitable. One way or another, those who have been doing very well out of the current flat-rate deals are going to be the ones who lose out, because they are getting things disproportionately cheap right now.
You are making an assumption that fraud has occurred. If, like a properly run bank, if depositors' money has been invested in capital-producing ventures (new hardware & cables to support expanded capacity). When depositors come to withdraw money, they are usually able to withdraw it unless there has been mismanagement and/or there is a run on the bank -- i.e. if ISP's have invested in expansion, they should be able to handle demand unless every single user wants everything out at once. The ISP's are running over a public-infrastructure (the phone cables). In the "last mile" -- phone companies and cable companies have been given monopolies in exchange for public service. As part of that public service, they should be expanding the network to meet projected capacity.
OTOH -- back in reality land -- we have examples of the phone companies that were given 3+Billion dollars in Bailout, ^h^h^h^h, handout ^h^h^h^h, expansion money to expand capacity -- of course that was quickly divided up among shareholders as dividends and no expansion was ever done. Normally -- if a person did this, it would be called fraud and they'd face prison terms of 10-15 years, maybe more for conspiracy. But this seems to be regarded as morally acceptable behavior of the "public" (in quotes, because they are often private companies that have been given an "encumbered monopoly" -- i.e. they are suppose to be providing a public service.
I don't know about the UK -- but given that the BBC gets a fee TV owners to watch content, I suspect they will somehow want that fee to continue for computer-delivered entertainment. Consumers in the US are already paying for video content from many video services in that we "get" to watch ads. Again -- some of that ad revenue, should, in some way be going to capacity upgrade at the server ends. While I have a premium U.S. internet connect, running at about 3Mbps (*cough*), I find that when I watch videos, I often cannot watch a 1Mbit stream reliably. At no time, however, do I find that my connection to my provider runs under ~320KB/s, and any well-connected software site downloads in the 300+KB/s range.
Thus it seems that the there are already intermittent capacity problems at or near the server end. The question is, should ISP's be allowed to sell a service which they cannot provide? Do ISP's need to be regulated like banks to prevent a bandwidth crisis -- forcing ISP's to limit their supported bandwidth sales to some multiple of their capacity? To make things clear to consumers, the "oversell" ratio should be public knowledge -- so consumers can choose what level of "sharing" or "risk" they want to take on and select ISP's accordingly.
In a way -- and this is frightening -- if ISP's do not sell and manage bandwidth and capacity responsibly, they may find that governments will be demanded (by consumers) to step in and do some regulation to keep ISP's from going into bandwidth-bankruptcy.
Because we can't get it?