BBC and ISPs Clash over iPlayer 350
randomtimes writes "A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC. ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope. '"The iPlayer has come along and made downloading a legal and mass market activity," said Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk. He said he believed ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they now face. "They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing," he said. ISPs needed to stop using the term 'unlimited' to describe their services and make it clear that if people wanted to watch hours of downloaded video content they would have to pay a higher tariff, he added.'"
Amen (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that consumer protection laws need to be beefed up to protect consumers against the outrageous practices of ISPs.
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:5, Insightful)
Marketing isn't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The BBC pays for upstream bandwidth. Consumers pay for downstream bandwidth. But ISPs don't actually have the bandwidth they're selling, so they want the BBC to pay as well for the bandwidth consumers already paid for. It's ridiculous.
Re:Amen (Score:5, Insightful)
Managing Free (Score:4, Insightful)
We're in this mess partly because the governments saw fit to grant monopolies to various companies who now behave like monopolies. Raise your hand if you're shocked. We should always be leery of patching bad government with more government, because it's probably going to turn out to be bad government, and then people will want to...
But, yes, your're right, these guys are selling 'Free' stuff and 'free' doesn't exist [bfccomputing.com]. In a non-monopoly position you might assume the customers are fools, but when they have no choice, it could be either. Certainly it's hard to chasten the customer put into this position if he doesn't have choice.
Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's a bad example, but it's also a bad idea.
Re:Amen (Score:1, Insightful)
I think that consumer protection laws need to be beefed up to protect consumers against the outrageous practices of ISPs.
And I would go further and say that the whole telecom industry needs to be nationalized and service should be given to all citizens for free. And can I get a pony with that too?.
Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see if I've got this right.
Consumers upgrade to high-speed internet. They pay for it.
When they actually start to use it, the ISPs start bitching about bandwidth and demanding more money.
...laura
Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Marketing isn't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
that is exactly what is going on, it is extortion. i am not one for BIG government regulation but there needs to be oversight of some sort, because if not then both the websites that serve news and other content and the customers will be squeezed by the ISPs because they have the keys to the tubes...
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:4, Insightful)
The rest of the bandwidth hogs point to the 'unlimited' marketing. Until the marketing of the service changes (and people are told about their limits and are capable of measuring them), you're still going to get grief.
"Arggh, a killer app! Kill it!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine that you're selling product X. The lovely BBC comes with an application that encourages lots of people to use lots of X. Fantastic! Coke and hookers all round!
Unless you've come up with some sort of freakish business model which relies on people paying for lots of X without actually using it. In which case, well, you're probably fucked.
Good.
What's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Each subscriber pays for his little tube, and the BBC pays for it's tube big enough to carry 300 Benny Hill streams.
So what's the problem? Why are ISPs bitching?
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:5, Insightful)
the ISP's sold me bandwidth on false assumptions that I wouldn't use it all, all the time. If they didn't plan properly then that's their fault when i do start to use all the bandwidth all the time.
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:4, Insightful)
ISP's are ultimately going to have to go to a model like cellphone contracts. 100 GB per month (or whatever). After that your bandwidth drops off or you pay for the overage, depending on your plan. Carry-over MB's and all. At least that's nominally fair. And maybe for those non-downloaders, there'd be a really low-cost, low volume plan.
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless the webpages are megabytes each there is. But that's not the point.
The point is the rate of information consumption. A large webpage (say, a few hundred k) will take longer to read than will the same amount of movie file. If the video rate is high enough, a few hundred kilobytes will pass in a few seconds or less.
The funny thing is that before the days of HD video, the ISPs sold their 'faster-than-dialup' service as 'fast' and 'unlimited'. I'm not sure why they put 'unlimited' in there, but they're paying for it now. I for one have no sympathy
Reinvest Your Profits (Score:4, Insightful)
When ISPs ask "who's going to pay for new infrastructure?", the answer should aways be "you are, in the form of reinvesting your profits into new development, like every other business does, you useless fracks". The "useless frack" part should be put at the end of most statements when dealing with government-mandated monopolies.
peak phone usage (Score:5, Insightful)
Under an endpoint driven QoS scheme, if millions of consumers all try to watch the latest BBC special at once, most of them will get the "all connections busy" error. They can then wait (like with POTS), or just start up a bittorrent so that the show will be stored locally when they come back later.
The key to ethical QoS schemes is that the endpoints should do the tagging, *not* the ISP. The ISP should just charge for the tagging. Currently, the ISP decides which kinds of traffic are "unacceptable" and throttles them. That is unacceptable. QoS can make the internet work at least as well as the POTS network.
Re:Marketing isn't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony (Score:5, Insightful)
But as soon as people do just what the service was explicitly advertised to do...the ISPs all start bleating.
I don't have any sympathy for them. They did it to themselves - they set the expectation you could use broadband to watch video, why are they acting all surprised when people do just that?
Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a house. I rent it out.
It doesn't matter if I rent it to someone with a family of 2, or a family of 5, it still costs me the same amount of annual maintenance, because I only have one house.
It doesn't matter if you're never home, or never leave, it still costs me the same amount of annual maintenance.
Line costs are like a house. You add up the capacity, you divide it by the amount of capacity you promise people, that's how many people you can support on your service. You divide your annual costs by that number, add a percentage for profit, and that is how you should price your services.
Now, as far as adding capacity, that's like building another house. It lets you get more customers, it doesn't make your existing customers more expensive to service.
The reason that the ISPs are having trouble is because their business model is based on fraud.
The fact that this fraud is normalized to the point that people consider it business as usual doesn't change the fact that they were fraudulently selling capacity they didn't have to deliver.
At the end of the day, they were renting the house out to several people at once, in the hopes that they would all be business travelers who are hardly ever home and there would always be an empty house when they needed it.
Now, all those business travelers are retiring all at once, and the fraud is being revealed.
This is the current ISPs business model. This is why they are throwing a fit.
When you get right down to it, it shouldn't be the responsibility of the public to eat the cost of their line improvements. They've been making large profits on false pretenses, and it should be those profits that are used to build the lines and rectify the situation.
Re:Amen (Score:5, Insightful)
But let's be honest here. For years now, geeks have been pretending that bandwidth is an unlimited resource. We've had huge ranting flamefests on Slashdot whenever anybody suggests that you should pay a per-packet charge for your data, or that you be restricted for re-selling your packets. That's not the only reason ISPs have to pretend that they're selling unlimited flat-rate access, but it's a big one.
Let's examine the choices here:
And don't say, "they can just build up so that there's enough bandwidth in case everybody wants to use the system at once." No telecom network operates on that basis. If it were feasible, the landline phone system wouldn't crash every time there's a natural disaster and everybody runs to the phone to see if Aunt Bee is OK.
Re:Managing Free (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forcing networks to support the theoretical peak usage is silly, just as sill as expanding all interstates to 10 lanes in each direction so that traffic can flow more smoothly during evacuations etc. The cost of such plans is just too high compared to the gains we'd have by it. In fact, the cost of not oversubscribing bandwidth would price internet access to the point where most people might have a dialup connection. If you keep up the comparison, imagine if we kept going on this peak theoretical usage, and said that this peak theoretical usage had to work anywhere. Well most internet traffic is fairly local (same city, state, country, etc). What if ISPs were required to have the same bandwidth between chicago and new york as they have between chicago and shanghai. If you consider these massive links, we just wouldn't have anywhere near enough bandwidth.
Phil
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:5, Insightful)
$10 - base charge (infrastructure maintenance, etc.)
$2/GB - first 10GB
$1/GB - next 100GB
$0.75/GB - anything over 110GB usage
There ya go. Cheap for people using low bandwidth. Not exuberant for people using lots of bandwidth. Adjust prices accordingly per region and then don't bitch (either customer or ISP) that they don't have money for bandwidth.
Going back on topic, BBC *pays* for the use of bandwidth on their side. If ISP "can't cope with demand", it is not BBC's problem. And BBC should post blacklisting messages for customers connecting from ISPs that throttle their service, and suggest ones that do not. But then UK has one of the crappiest service from what I can read on forums like for EVE Online. Like people wanting to play a low bandwidth game like EVE can't connect because Tiscani choses to shaft them - http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=553090 [eve-online.com]
Re:Managing Free (Score:3, Insightful)
It's true that there is an innate "Yankee" cultural distrust of government - but to simply assume that's wrong because your personal culture didn't leave you with any such warning is foolish.
There are some very few governments in the world today that seem to work well and generally do good. The necessary but not sufficient requirements seem to be 1.) a rich and well educated populace 2.) a population under 10 million.
But even in those places, there's always a risk that *any* power structure can be co-opted for evil. It happens constantly; assuming that it's not going to happen to your government is ignorant and dangerous.
Re:Wait for failure before bringing in government (Score:4, Insightful)
Most customers don't have any idea how the internet works. And that's fine. It's a big complex system, and really they only need to know enough to get by. The problem is that ISPs can use that lack of understanding to abuse customers like this. It's what makes the net neutrality issue such a serious one.
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:4, Insightful)
If their ISP is advertising "unlimited bandwidth" they shouldn't have to understand the concept of bandwith. All they should have to know is that they can have as much of it as they want.
The ISP, OTOH, doesn't understand the concept of "telling the truth."
Re:Wait for failure before bringing in government (Score:3, Insightful)
>Sure the ISP can send a bill.
A rhetorical question, or better still a "strawman" of your choosing that has nothing to do with the issue discussed.
If you are going to drag in the "regulation" boogeyman of the libertarian, consider that cartel-like collusion is the OPPOSITE of a free market machine.
The ISP's are PERFECTLY capable of selling "metered" service by the megabyte to the consumer. This is a fact, and no one decries such plainly worded terms of service.
The ISPs want to keep promising "unlimited" service and mislead the customer, and they want to do it by colluding on a single domain to bring them down... in effect the ISPs want to derail what has been until now a free market. A free market doesn't care if the bytes you consume on your "unlimited" Internet are Google's bytes or the BBC.
Re:Utter foolishness (Score:3, Insightful)
The ISPs then had a new product to sell - ADSL2, with speeds up to 8 Meg, and they advertised it like crazy and they promised Dad could read email, while mum was downloading showtunes from itunes, while Son was playing online games, and Daughter was downloading funny clips from youtube.
They wanted everyone to move to the new system and they deliberately hyped all the bandwidth hogging services as the reason you really should move to faster broadband.
Stupidly they fought for market share on price at the same time, some ISPs were offering free home broadband with your mobile phone price plan for example. At the time even pro consumer groups were saying the prices were too low and unsustainable.
So here we are a few years later, ISPs are shocked that people are using bandwith hogging services, they themselves promoted, and because of the price war, margins are too tight to widen pipes.
iPlayer has proven such a success there isn't a hope in hell of the BBC being made to stop the service and any money the BBC has to pay out, comes out of the licence fee, and that isn't going to happen either. The ISPs dug their own grave and some aren't going to dig their way out.
Re:Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:3, Insightful)
Residential ISPs (at least in the US) typically oversell like there's no tomorrow, sometimes block ports to force you to use their 'business' service to say...run an HTTP server without the tacky port number at the end of the URL. 'Business' lines usually aren't oversold and go down about as often as residential ISPs upgrade their infrastructure, usually don't block ports, and tend to have better upstream.
Think of it as buying from a pharmacist instead of a dealer.
Re:Amen (Score:3, Insightful)
You realised it.
Haven't we been here before? (Score:5, Insightful)
It made their product a niche product and eventually ALL of those companies abandoned that billing scheme in favor of unlimited pricing. Guess what happened? The internet hit critical mass BECAUSE they changed to "unlimited" monthly plans.
So now, in 2008, we are looking back into metered service? Good luck with that. My gut tells me "the people" will reject it. Just like they did back in the 80's and 90's. As soon as someone (Netzero) offered all you can eat for one price....the other competitors started bleeding customers. It will be the same this time around.
People don't want to look over their shoulders or monitor their usage. They do it for cell phones because they have to (no other choice). Not true for ISP's.
Re:"Arggh, a killer app! Kill it!" (Score:1, Insightful)
Sounds like my local gym membership :-) Apart from in January.
Re:Utter foolishness (Score:3, Insightful)
If people weren't using it, then they wouldn't pay $1 more for 15 Mbps over 1 Mbps. Why are they offering such high speed packages? Because they know people want it. They are selling something they know people want, yet they aren't able to deliver. It hasn't "snuck" up on them. The ISPs have been steadily increasing their package speeds. If they haven't been increasing their core at the same rate (and they haven't) then it is their own fault, and not because of any unexpected demand. It may be that in the post 2000 years spending on the core has decreased while desire for revenue (sell higher priced packages) has increased. But just because they haven't been doing what they know is technically required for a stable network doesn't mean they didn't see it coming or excuse them when the network approaches unusability under increased demand. If the packages don't make sense financially, they shouldn't have offered them.
And start paying a lot closer to what dedicated bandwidth costs businesses today.
You talked about T1 pricing. One reason that's an issue is because of local loops. The phone company charges anywhere from $100 to $300 (or more) just to connect one end to the other. That's the greatest cost for a T1. Then add the increased support. In reality, the data flowing over the wire is almost free. It's getting the dedicated wires to the ISP and the increased level of service (ever have a phone company tech spend 20 hours at your home for a single 1.5Mbps DSL connection? I've had it with a T1, and it's not that uncommon when there are minor intermittent issues). The ISPs saw this coming. They charged more where they could, paid less where they could, and there is a collision happening between the two.
Re:Amen (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe for American geeks, but Australian geeks have [ii.net] had [on.net] quota [peopletelecom.com.au] systems [aapt.com.au] for years and it works perfectly well. The last unlimited account I had was a dialup account in the early 2000's (iiNet Explorer), but even unlimited dialup is something of a rarity these days. There are a handful of providers offering unlimited downloads on low-speed ADSL connections (usually 256kbit), but the vast majority of ADSL plans give you a fixed amount of downloads per month at a fixed price. For home accounts, exceeding your quota typically results in you being shaped for the remainder of the month (to 64 to 128kbit depending on the ISP) so you can still access the internet but it's not much fun. On business-oriented accounts they'll normally charge a per-megabyte fee for excess usage. Some ISPs also let you buy blocks of additional quota on an ad-hoc basis for a premium, to encourage people to keep within their monthly quota (presumably this makes it easier for the ISP to anticipate demand on their network).
While I would of course prefer to be able to download an unlimited amount of data each month, obviously that's not realistic and a quota system like this makes it clear what the actual costs are and keeps demand in check. This system works perfectly well, but the trick is actually getting ISPs to switch to it -- if all your competitors advertise "unlimited downloads*" and you advertise "100 GB per month" you're going to look much worse, even if your "unlimited" competitor throttle particular types of traffic. Here it happened when they started rolling out ADSL, because having unlimited downloads at 10x the speed of dialup was utterly untenable. Bandwidth costs are a lot lower in the US so they've been able to keep offering "unlimited" for a lot longer knowing that the majority of users would subsidise the few who actually do use a lot of bandwidth, but the increasing speeds of consumer internet connections coupled with the increasing amount of high-bandwidth content available means the camel's back has to break, eventually.
What is the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Full bandwidth until 10 GB limit.
128kbps after limit is reached.
Reset each month.
The numbers are just pulled out of the air. You'll want enough GB than most people will never hit it, making the plan infinite for all practical purposes. They can keep their computers turned on every day, all day. No surprises, no huge bill suddenly happening because they passed the cap. Even if someone get some malware maxing their connection. Customers might accept that the email-spamming virus "makes the Internet slow". They will NOT accept a $5000 bill for the bandwith used by said virus.
And after the cap, it's still as good as infinite. Email and browsing will function fine, just a little bit slow.
The only ones that will notice are heavy users. I'll happily pay a bit extra for the bandwidth I use. Just get a bigger plan with more GB before capped.
Such a plan could also easily be extended with off-peak rates. Usage between 2am-6am only count 50% towards your cap limit, for example.
Dead simple to implement, and would make perfect sense for everyone. No?