BT stands for "British Telecom," Something they failed to mention, except in TFA
I hate it when people use too many arbitrary abbrivations. Let's start actually typing out names to set a context, then let people abbrivate in comments... It's not British Telecom. It hasn't been so since 1991 when it changed its name to BT Group Plc.
This kind of service differentiation requires some hefty investment in know-how and routing equipment on the part of the ISP.
Current ubiquitous routing technology allows differentiating on the basis of simple parameters like source and destination. This is fine when a customer negotiates with their ISP a preferential service (say lower latency or higher throughput). But to distinguish on traffic based on the session or application layer protocols (eg HTTP) requires a huge amount of extra intelligence in the routers and this is not currently done AFAIK.
Such differentiation is done at the point of entry into the ISP so it isn't a matter of upgrading large central routers -- like the one CISCO recently announce:) -- but it still requires a relatively large amount of processing power and a huge amount of state to inspect each packet and track flows.
Call me a cynic but I think this is pie in the sky stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Current ubiquitous routing technology allows differentiating on the basis of simple parameters like source and destination. This is fine when a customer negotiates with their ISP a preferential service (say lower latency or higher throughput). But to distinguish on traffic based on the session or application layer protocols (eg HTTP) requires a huge amount of extra intelligence in the routers and this is not currently done AFAIK. :) -- but it still requires a relatively large amount of processing power and a huge amount of state to inspect each packet and track flows.
Such differentiation is done at the point of entry into the ISP so it isn't a matter of upgrading large central routers -- like the one CISCO recently announce
Call me a cynic but I think this is pie in the sky stuff.