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."

Comments

Re:The bbc is joking what is next a net fee like t

[pxlmusic]

it's more of that stupid notion that the ISPs are trying to get away with double-dipping their customers.

And a BBC viewer says :

[unity100]

"shove it"

Re:Don't most ISPs already have tiered service pla

[jrumney]

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.

Re:We tried this back in 2004, and in mobile netwo

[Zarhan]

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.

Credit card numbers

[neapolitan]

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.

Re:Credit card numbers

[tlhIngan]

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.

Not only that, but the remainder of the digits in the first group of 4 digits are used to identify the issuing bank. While it's not actually a bulletproof method, knowing where someone is can narrow down the list of valid codes even smaller. Just take the valid numbers, cross-reference them with the list of Visa or Mastercard bank codes, and with the smaller list of numbers, find the banks that are in the local area, and use it knock off a few more numbers (someone in the US will probably not have a UK credit card, for example - they might, but it's extremely rare).

The entropy in the first 4 digits is extremely low.

Anyhow, sharing codes is easy to prevent - just do IP geolocation - non-UK IPs should be restricted from using the codes (and for the most part, IP geolocation is reasonably country accurate), and ensure that one code isn't used from multiple IPs in too often a time, or one code used simultaneously.

Re:I'm confused..

[nabsltd]

One big clue to this is to look at pricing where market share isn't being fought over. Business connections in the US are anywhere 2-4x the prices being charged for home connections. This is not a matter of higher utilization because these business connections are sold on the same terms as home connections with "burstable" bandwidth and maximum transfer caps.

First, why would you think that ISPs aren't fighting for market share with business connections?

Second, the reason business connections cost more is that generally you get a lot more. Although I agree with the amount of the price difference, my bandwidth is 24/7 guaranteed, with no cap on the total amount of data transferred. Sure, I pay about double what a "residential" customer pays, but all that really gets me is 5 static IPs, no blocked ports, and an SLA. In general, business customers don't have any of the limits that residential customers have, and that's why the connection costs more for the same speed, but that's not true with my ISP (Verizon FIOS). Residential customers get the same guaranteed bandwidth and no cap (not even a hidden one).

At my work, we also pay a fixed rate regardless of bytes transferred, have 24/7 guaranteed bandwidth, and have no cap. I don't know what residential customers of that ISP get, though, as I don't know any in the area.