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BT Content Connect May Impact Net Neutrality
a Flatbed Darkly writes "BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet; BT has denied the allegations, from Open Rights Group among others, that this, despite certainly being an anti-competitive service, does not create a two-tier internet. From the article: '"Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery," a BT spokeswoman said.'"
She denies that their service creates a two-tier internet, then goes on to describe their service which, is to create a two-tier internet. Nice.
"differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery" Certainly sounds like two tiers to me...
I ran that through babelfish and got the translation: "Fuck you! We'll do whatever we want and you can't do a thing about it."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
By definition, differentiating negates net neutrality
Do they think people are so stupid that they can just use big words to lie to people? Oh wait...
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Just in case you aren't being silly, BT (in this case) is short for British Telecom.
Summation 2
Sounds like Akamai
I don't have the exact statistics, so I may be wrong - feel free to downvote if you disprove this - but I've rarely seen anyone not on a BT line, until the '60s the company which was previously BT had a complete (government-instated) monopoly of telecom infrastructure, and it is known that BT still owns the majority of lines. A lot of TSPs won't give service over anything but BT lines, and I've seen a few ISPs do similarly. If this is being offered to all ISPs on BT's network, as the BBC article claims, then this is being offered to near enough every ISP in Britain.
To be fair and having RTFA, this doesn't seem to impact on Net Neutrality at all. This is a BT sponsored CDN (Content Delivery Network) that they are offering to their customers. This does not affect the traffic passing over the network, they are simply offering a network of local hosts to optimise content delivery. Like Akami and other such geographical CDN.
From the BBC article:
The spokesperson said that BT would not throttle or discriminate against other video services on the network, but did not rule out that ISPs using the network could do so.
BT already do. Between 4PM and 12AM, some services are throttled to a point where they are not usable. Youtube being one of them.
3:57PM, Youtube is fine, 4:03PM, good luck trying to play anything that is HD. iPlayer plays fine.
BULLSHIT! - Wait we're not playing BS Bingo?
BT needs disambiguation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT
Acronyms can be confusing, so please explain them before using the acronym.
I hate signatures
Going through the content connect website, it appears that instead of content traveling from content providers through the internet to an ISP, then to end users, instead, now it goes from a content connect content provider, who is hosting the content provider's content, held in cache, somehow physically closer to end users, and bypasses the ISP.
Obviously this cannot be true, but that is what the combination of words and moving images would present.
Most vexing is the concept that this is supposed to make high quality video use faster, but the bullet point list includes that consumers are willing to pay more for higher quality video than speed.
I do not understand what content connect is supposed to be doing, or why. I do understand that if an ISP chooses to use content connect for specific content and not for other content, and this affects speed somehow, that this would violate net neutrality. On the other hand, if all content is shuttled through content connect, in effect, that makes the ISP superfluous.
Better than me, I read the summary two times substituting "bluetooth." I was very confused.
They dream to pop each packet and charge Apple, MS, Google ect per packet.
Until then they will just cash in on the end users addiction for a non buffering connection every month.
Bittorrent does provide a nice cover in a press release when all non enhanced content hits a hard shaped wall.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Similar to those deployed by Akamai and Limelight for their customers, and by Google and Microsoft for themselves.
A typical case of a Telco moving into an additional market.
Arguably, it does allow BT to offer multi-tier services. But it is not packet-level differentiation
in the network, which is the issue at the heart of the net-neutrality debate.
If Content Distribution Networks violate net neutrality and the /. crowd thinks so, then
we should be blasting Akamai and Google long time before we started blasting the Telcos.
I'm, sadly, with BT currently (not my choice); BitTorrent seems affected from about 2pm onwards, though I'm unsure when it ends as I'm generally offline after 11pm.
Please excuse what is probably a fairly ignorant question, I'm not too clued in about networking.
A quick look about the BT website in the summary brings up a page supposedly explaining how it works: what they seem to be saying is that they take "Connect Content" and put it on its own server which is physically closer to wherever you are. Then, instead of having to connect to a server, say, 3,000 miles away via choc-a-bloc networks for that video, you're connecting to one maybe one or two hundred miles away with fewer users, saving you a lot of routing and time in exchange for a fee.
My question is, how exactly is that related to net neutrality? I generally thought NN was more about the possibility of an ISP throttling or even completely blocking data from someone they don't like if you don't pay up. To me this seems to be more like the "premium download server" different hosting websites seem to have where if you pay more you can jump the queue to faster hardware with fewer users. What are the differences in principle between this and paying a fee for your own home server and hosting the video there instead of streaming it from [media website here] every time? Or has the BT PR department tactfully left something out of their explanation?
Yeah and I read this as Bi-Tier
A lot of the mobile phone subscription deals and some of the 3G internet-only subscriptions have severe limits but 'unlimited' access to sites like facebook and youtube.
You can also buy additional access to a selection of usual social-media sites for most subscriptions. Look here for some pricing examples.
With our restrictive data limits even on fixed ADSL lines i would not be surprised if we get so see some "unlimited access to facebook" deals in the near future.
Its already bad and it is only going to get worse.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
The ISPs have always had a market where more money == faster service, we are also used to the idea of paywalls where some stuff is free and other stuff needs money to get access to. So where, exactly, does this idea that everyone should get access to everything for the same price come from? Would it still be "net neutral" if Facebook suddenly started charging $10 / year for "membership"? Is that really any different from your ISP saying "If you want to get access to service X, it'll cost you more money"? The only difference seems to me to be who does the charging - one organisation and that's business (or monetising), a different organisation and people bleat on about net neutrality.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The problem is that the backbone necessary to do that costs serious money. A CDN is a more efficient use of the existing infrastructure, and costs a whole lot less than an extra few thousand miles of fiber.
What amazes me is that BT and other ISPs don't simply offer this for free, because it benefits them as much as it does their customers. I guess any revenue stream is a good revenue stream, but if they simply cached ALL static content and worked out deals with people like NetFlix to store encrypted copies of their movies for local serving rather than streaming every copy of every movie across the Internet backbone, it would make BT seem like the fastest ISP *EVER*, save them gobs and shitloads of money on backbone bandwidth, allow them to raise monthly caps and allotted speeds to very high levels without putting their network under significantly more strain, put off expensive backbone upgrades for years, and cost them very little
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
The situation is the same here in the UK too; extortionate data charges and use policies, but all you can eat data for YouTube and Facebook.
I find the YouTube deal particularly annoying, simply because whenever I went over my data limits, it was normally for email and browsing, and certainly not streamed video. So based on the effect that streamed video is going to put a much bigger strain on a mobile network than web and email, I can only assume that backroom deals have been done, and hence a multi-tiered internet is beginning to appear.
Nobody has yet to explain why it's wrong for them to charge for access to their private networks however they wish.
So what are you going to do? Make it illegal to bypass existing internet nodes to deliver IP services? Make it illegal to offer more bandwidth than existing IP services? How about making it illegal to charge more than any existing IP Service? How about making it illegal to charge less than any existing IP Service?
Why don't we just quit all this nonsense and pass laws for bandwidth and price controls, along with an "IP Commission" to enforce them?
Oops! Somebody once said "Be careful with sarcasm; the idiots are certain take it as advice."
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Content Connect enables ISPs to store video within their own networks, closer to the user, as opposed to third-party companies – such as Akamai, which delivers the BBC's iPlayer – caching popular content around the globe. By paying the ISP, rather than the third-party company, users could get a guaranteed delivery of service even at peak times.
In other words, you can pay them to host your video for you. BBC's data moves at the same speed and with the same priority as that ninja guy's data. The difference is that BBC's data will move less distance because it is being hosted by the ISP near the user. Amazon does the same thing with cloud front except that it is not an ISP and may not be able to do it as efficiently.
But it would also create a situation where companies that are unwilling – or unable – to pay would have their content delivered less efficiently to the end user.
This is absolutly true. If you are not willing to pay for premium content hosting from the ISP, you will have less efficent service. However, that is becase the data is being hosted in a new way that could not be done before. Not because other data is being slowed down. This is not a direct threat to net neutrality. This is yet another buisness model/industry for ISPs to expand to.
I had the misfortune of being at the end of a BT line for the past 10 days, and noticed throttling of torrents, at least, at some times of the day.
I had been torrenting on a Zen line and had been maxing out the line all day with the stuff I was downloading. When I tried to finish a torrent off on the BT (business grade) connection it would only go to a maximum of about 25k/sec. Fired up some other torrents, and whilst trying to figure out what was going on, the maximum overall for multiple torrents seemed to move to 35k/sec.
I SSH'd into a box on the Zen line, and had a look at a torrent there. It was maxing out the line, so I started the same torrent on my laptop from this BT line..... 35k/second. The line was capable of downloads otherwise of 90k/sec. So from my data point of 1, they were definitely throttling. As time went on, the torrent throttling appeared to go away, and by the late evening the torrents were maxing out the BT line too. Remember, business grade. Isn't the contention ratio 20:1 on that, but 50:1 on consumer services (like the Zen line I mentioned)? So it utterly reeked of them interfering, rather than just the intentionally shit set up getting in the way. Things are intentionally shit to try and protect the profits from guaranteed service services - proper leased lines.
The BT Business hub thing is a piece of shit too. The wireless range is a joke (totally unsuitable for all but the smallest of offices), the shitty BT/2wire router controls 3 networks (BTFusionnnn, BTBusinessnnn, BTOpenworld) - meaning the WLAN you want to use is noisy. There doesn't appear to be a way to upgrade the aerial either, which can be enough to cheaply solve some WLAN issues. BT are clearly providing limited kit knowing that people will have problems and will have to upgrade. I bet BT want a piece of that upgrade market - and considering the people who have BT as their ISP tend to do so because they know no better, BT know that when the clueless do have to upgrade they will come back to BT. The clueless do not recognise their cluelessness, so think they have made good decisions about who to do business with, so do not think twice (once would be a fucking novelty!) about dealing with BT again. In fact, if they went elsewhere, perhaps they had made a poor decision first time 'round? Many or most people don't want to face buyers' remorse, and some will actively try and avoid it by not thinking, so will dogmatically stick with their past decisions.
Packet loss over the shitty wireless or sub-par BT internet service through this POS business hub meant I had problems getting downloads to work from the BBC iplayer too. I use get_iplayer and the banned version of rtmpdump rather than whatever proprietary nonsense the BBC are telling you you need, and the packet loss was upsetting rtmpdump.
Anyway, after that fucking rant, fuck BT. Even though they have been broken up they clearly still are practising the same bullshit they always have. No doubt the shareholders of all the various bits of BT overlap quite considerably, so it is no surprise they still seem to act as one business.
Car analogies break down.
35k/sec? Around 4am, when I find myself with little to do at such a time but download, I've managed 300k/sec over torrents, more than the line's apparently capable of, but typically torrenting speeds rarely break 1k/sec. To add to the litany of anti-BT complaints, the home hubs default to opening port 4567 (not sure about business), and it seems impossible to close it for more than a few minutes without the router opening it again. Apparently this is for firmware updates, but the tinfoil hatter in me says it's a backdoor. Rationally, it's more likely to be an unintentional but blatant vulnerability.
They don't need to throttle anything - that would be legally dubious. It's much safer for them to just do nothing, neglecting to upgrade the connection. They will still be providing a 'best effort' service, but just making sure that the best they can do isn't too good.
I'm pretty sure this is what Time Warner / Road Runner are doing in my Kansas City neighborhood right now. Every evening I get to see my DL rate drop to .8-2mbps and my pings rise to about 100 with occasional packet loss. It's sad when my 1mbps UL is greater than my DL.