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BT Wants Cash For iPlayer, Video Bandwidth
eldavojohn writes "British Telecom is asking for more money for the bandwidth that iPlayer and video streaming sites eat up. The BBC's Tech Editor is claiming that 'Now Britain's biggest internet service provider is making it clear that, in a cut-throat broadband market, something is going to have to give — and net neutrality may have to be chucked overboard.' The BBC and BT are currently already in talks over how to get past this together. This might sound like a familiar battle from over a year ago."
BT have a TV over the internet offer called "BT Vision" its suffering (and just lost its CEO) in competition with Rupert "any view that pays" Murdoch's Sky. Now if BT could get a richer experience out of iPlayer and access to a longer back catalogue than simply the last 7 days then this would help them in competition with Sky.
So I'd expect this to end up with BT agreeing to support iPlayer in the same way but an "interesting" tie-up between BT and the BBC around the delivery of iPlayer+ features to its BT Vision customers.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This shouldn't be an issue at all; the BBC's ISP should be charging them a fortune for their high bandwidth use and then the squabble is between ISPs for peering costs. Also BT should be charging by the gigabyte instead of offering unrealistic "unlimited" packages that cause problems when people actually use their bandwidth.
So video over IP is wasting BT's bandwidth eh? How about increasing the bandwidth instead of reducing the share of it subscribers are allowed to get? This is typical greedy telco mentality: let's milk the existing infrastructure for all it's worth, instead of investing in said infrastructure. Heck, if Japan or Korea ISPs can provide very high bandwidth residential internet to their customers, why couldn't the UK? This is called investing in the future, and it's what we need in times of economic crisis.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
BBC shouldn't give a penny to BT. They should cut them off.
From the perspective of BTs dumb mass audience, who chose BT because it bundled the prettiest ADSL modem, the word will quickly spread that BT is pants because your can't get "teh TVs".
Problem solved.
When people sign up for broadband, one of the main things they want it for in this country is iPlayer. If iPlayer doesn't work well on BT Internet, they will go to another ISP where it does work. That will be a selling point for their competitors. For that reason, BBC can tell them to get lost.
"We oversold and can't cope with the costs. Subsidise us."
Well, fuck you BT. You made your bed; Lie in it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
When you charge pennies for a service - the big UK ISPs have been on a race to zero for years now - you'll come unstuck when people actually want to use the service. Duh. Whatever happened to charging a fair price, and then delivering a fair service? It's not rocket science.
Super Awesome Broadband
If all these ISPs realized advertising unlimited internet use would sell people on the idea they could use unlimited internet use maybe they should have built their infrastructure to handle it, or not market it as such. If they have anyone to whine to, it's themselves and their own short sightedness.
..BT (not for them, mind you, just with them on technical projects), all I can say is that if BT (and OpenReach) would spend more on their hardware and infrastructure and less on their asinine marketing and the outsourcing of their customer support (which is a hugely inefficient operation), and all the other stupid crap that they spend money on, this would be a none-issue.
Hey, BT, you still have a freaking monopoly, despite the creation of OpenReach. If you can't make money with a monopoly, you deserve to go under.
BT have a Heavy User package (£20.54pcm) that contains the following as part of it's description...
If you can't afford to provide it then don't advertise it, fuckwits. Manage your customer's expectations properly and stop making promises you can't keep, it's a much more sustainable business model.
When all the bits look the same, there is no way to discriminate between them.
The IP's of the BBC aren't going to be changing on a daily basis - you can match on that.
There's an agreement in place since the government essentially said "do this voluntarily, on your terms, or we'll make it a legal requirement". Believe me, the terms written up by a bunch of network engineers are far better - the original request included logging anyone who hit something on the list, which was thrown out early on due to the possibility of false positives.
You, Sir, are a useful idiot, and you fail to understand even the basic principles of negotiation.
(1) Any negotiation must start with the skilled party requesting far more than he expects to get. The concessions merely amount to reducing the agreed terms to what that party was hoping for. In this case, "logging everyone who hits one site on the IWF list" was not going to happen anyway - but if you ask for it, your opponent will rejoice when that term is conceded, while the government can be content that what they were actually aiming for, which is an infrastructure for censorship, has been successfully implemented.
(2) "Do this voluntarily or we'll force you to do it" is logically equivalent to "we're forcing you to do it". EITHER you do it OR you do it.
(3) Network engineer terms, oh really? No "bunch of network engineers" would agree to reporting as 404 what is (generously) a 403 Forbidden. A "bunch of network engineers" getting the final say would not have the final detour of the list being through government, which can add sites at will and in secret.
The IWF has a singular purpose: ensuring that there is a framework for censorship on the Internet, to be used whenever necessary. Also, if it became necessary to do some official logging, it'd just be be a matter of saying "please forward us those logs periodically". Of course IWF hits are logged unofficially at least temporarily, because all hits to IWF list IP addresses go via caching servers, and you can assume that any server has logging on unless there's some mound of evidence to show otherwise.
I have to say I'm astonished that BT is third from the bottom. I would have expected it to be bottom. I had to help a friend recently, who had made the mistake of signing up to BT, with some bandwidth problems (other than the standard throttling from 5-midnight).
BT operates a slave plantation in India for customer support. They are the singular worst customer support I have ever encountered. They tell you absolutely anything you want to hear, lying in the process. A engineer needed to come and check the line. However it took 3 weeks of shouting at customer support to actually get someone to turn up. Every day we were promised the engineer would come the next day, they never ever showed. In the end had to make an official complaint by snailmail to get someone to turn up.
And let's not forget Phorm.
BT would be much better concentrating on fixing their massive problems with their service than talking about iPlayer. The BBC should tell BT to go fuck themselves.
This is just BT believing that because they used to be the national phone service they have a right to dominate any communications market and charge whatever they like.
There is a simple solution to this: the BBC should just ignore them. If they decide to limit or block access to iPlayer then I'm sure their competition will make mincemeat of them given its popularity. All they need to do is advertise that they have iPlayer access and let the market decide - this is one time that leaving things to the market might actually work.
The issue in the UK is that they do pass it on to consumers already but that that extra cash that should be for infrastructure is just pocketed as extra profit instead by either the ISP or BT.
British users are already not as heavy bandwidth users as in other countries that pay less for a faster connection with more bandwidth. As BT have a monopoly they can get away with this as there is no true nationwide competition threat to cause them any harm when they do do this.
BT paid for an infrastructure upgrade already called 21cn but they refused to roll out access to it initially until OFCOM change competition rules to help them maintain their monopoly and further increase profits. As such they clearly have the money in their profits to pay for these upgrades, they just have no motivation to do them, and when they do, they only do so with the promise that they can hold onto their monopoly longer or extort money from ISPs by refusing to allow them access if they don't pay up meaning as soon as one ISP crumbles they all have to or lose out to the one that did crumble.
What? There are only, like 100 of the damned things.
This isn't like the US where the ISPs have carved out local monopolies.
BT operates at several different levels. They sell bandwidth to the 100 odd ISPs that operate in your exchanges because they control the actual physical infrastructure. If BT can get away with it (probably) then they can increase the charge to the ISPs for their customers accessing iPlayer. Whereas what they should be doing is charging a cost for bandwidth regardless of its use.