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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."
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.
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).
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'.
1) they have their head up their asses
2) they mumble under their breaths what the BNP says aloud.
It could be the last 12 digits of your credit card number. :D
Still just as sharable as any other password. The last 12 digits of mine is 662628812973. Go spend spend spend my friend...
In the US, ISPs are fighting for market share. Most home connections are operating at zero or negative profit so they can acquire greater market share. This is offset by other business operations, such as telephone service, cable TV, etc.
If things are in the same state in the UK, then the ISPs (a) can't charge their customers more and (b) aren't charging what the connection costs.
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.
In the US one "solution" to this is to charge the folks supplying content. Some of them, notably Google, aren't making anything and aren't selling anything directly. But their operation is extremely cash-rich and they aren't subject to market share issues. Face it, the ISPs are going to have to start charging what the connections cost when they stop fighting over market share. And either consumer prices are going to match the business prices or they are going to get paid by someone else.
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.
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?
"This model seems to work fairly well for the mobile phone industry, and the pricing is transparent and sustainable."
and we've seen what they charge for text messages. i don't trust that.
"The bandwidth simply isn't there to support everyone doing that, and when commodities are scarce, prices go up."
and referring to bandwidth as a commodity seems a little like fallacious thinking.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."