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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.
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.
BT needs disambiguation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT
Acronyms can be confusing, so please explain them before using the acronym.
I hate signatures
In UK terms, back-haul refers to the connection from the ADSL provider's kit in the exchange ( central office ) back to the ISP's network through the ADSL provider's POPs. This is distinct from the ISP's connection to the Internet ( Level 3 in your example ).
ISPs which rent ADSL services wholesale from BT Group generally use BT's back-haul but there are various back-haul options ( big players being BE, Easynet and C&W ).
This BT service delivers content from the POPs, so that the ISP's backhaul is not loaded with streaming media.
I believe you're slightly misinformed. There are three broad "classes" of internet connection in Britain: Firstly, there's cable, provided by Virgin Media - phone, TV and net traffic all go over their fibre/copper, so BT's services don't apply there. I couldn't find a figure for how many subscribers they have, but they are a very large company so I'd imagine the number is not insignificant.
Secondly, there's BT Wholesale. This uses BT's infrastructure, linked to BT equipment at the local exchange, and resold to consumers via retail ISPs (including BT's own retail division). These retail ISPs are the ones covered by Content Connect. Five years ago this covered almost all users in Britain, and even now BT Wholesale products have many millions of users, but their reach is declining.
The final category is LLU, or 'Local Loop Unbundled' services. These are the ones that require a BT line (in order to connect you to the local exchange), but then hook that line into the ISPs own equipment when it gets there. Ofcom forced BT to accommodate the LLU equipment in their exchanges. This entirely bypasses BT Wholesale (so no Content Connect), meaning that the retail ISP takes home more of the profit, which is why it's becoming more popular with the big ISPs who can afford to install their own DSL hardware at a decent number of exchanges. Services from Sky, TalkTalk, Be, and others use LLU equipment where available but fall back to a BT Wholesale product for those users connected to exchanges where their equipment has not been installed.
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.
Yeah and I read this as Bi-Tier
I think this is basically an Akamai-like caching server. And I can see where the controversy lies.
If BT implements this and doesn't intentionally throttle other services, I don't see this as a violation of neutrality - BT is not discriminating against anyone in using the Internet pipe, they are simply maintaining a cache service for those who want to cough up a little more dough for their web sites to be stored in a local cache. BP customers can still access anything they want on the Internet at Internet speeds, but certain things run at local speed which is faster.
However, I can see how this could be easily abused, if BT started speeding up the Internet packets (*) coming from their customers who paid for the caching service and slowing down everyone else's, or started blocking or throttling sites that refused to pay for it, or lowered their overall Internet connection to the point where only cached sites were useful.
I can also see how this could be interpreted as a "two tier" system, but such systems have been in use for quite some years in the US and have been very successful here. They do make some web pages faster than others, but I haven't seen many reports of ISPs intentionally throttling their regular Internet bandwidth to punish service providers who don't pay up. I've heard of ISPs who try to force high-bandwidth content providers to subscribe, and that's wrong, but that's a matter of abusing the technology, not a problem inherent to the technology.
Frankly, I don't understand why an ISP wouldn't want to simply start caching all static content. But, unfortunately, that means that most content they really want to cache is not going to be. Streaming video from someone like NetFlix is encrypted so the movie you watch is a different set of bits from the same exact movie your neighbor watches 5 minutes later. BitTorrent is not only comprised of a great deal of illegal content that the ISPs don't want in their cache servers, it's also frequently encrypted, and the BitTorrent protocol is going to tend to prefer "local" clients so it's already optimized to save backbone usage when possible anyway.
YouTube would be brilliant for this sort of thing, and YouTube actually uses Akamai if I recall correctly.
(*) By "Internet packets", I'm referring to caching customers who might only cache static content. This is how my company uses Akamai - we give Akamai a copy of all of our static content (ie. pictures of our product), they replicate it out to all of their edge servers around the world as needed, and we simply use an Akamai URL to access the image on the web site. Akamai automatically determines the closest server to the customer and serves them up the replacement image. All encrypted and dynamic content is directly between the customer and our web servers.
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