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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."
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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?
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.