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.'"
Common Sense is asking too much... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm torn as to lay blame to other providers for running unethical marketing campaigns.(e.g. get unlomited everything only to have a buried clause in a TOS/AUP/etc. that nullifies all the marketing promises.) or people not performing due-diligence.
Regards,
Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:5, Interesting)
How stupid do those ISPs look now (Score:4, Interesting)
At the very least they look incompetant having so woefully underestimated the needs of their customers and over estimated their services.
At the worst they look crinminal for misselling a service and now they're getting outted by these services that have outed them.
If the users are over using their bandwith as given to them in their contracts then give them the surcharge or cut them off. The BBC has payed for their bandwith so there's no reason to get angry there. Frankly this has been an amazingly long time coming and we can only hope that people pick up and start class action suits for these shady business practices. Personally when I have my 8 meg connection which was sold to me via the internet on this BT page "BT UNLIMITED INTERNET UP 8Mb CONNECTION" and several times hearing them claim "Unlimited Downloads" I don't expect to record a graph of my conneciton speeds dropping during peak times to maybe 32KB/s, it's just not acceptable.
When I phone my friends up during peak times I don't get to say fewer words per second, so why is my internet connection any different?
Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:3, Interesting)
The site that has all the ads and big images and videos already pays their own provider to move all that content into the cloud. So each end (web site on one end, viewer on the other) are paying for their respective bandwidths. It's not right that one end should go over to the other customer and demand a double payment.
The suggestion is that consumer grade accounts could be set up that charge by the megabyte actually downloaded. If you don't want to see all those images, turn images off in your browser, or don't go there. Hint: that's not all that much compared to the people that surf YouTube all day and catch up on BBC the next day.
Because it sucks for entertainment. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would
Internet access is flat-rate or nothing for me.
Utter foolishness (Score:4, Interesting)
Today, ISPs pay for bandwidth resources. They are indeed responsible at some level of compensation for how much they are sucking down from elsewhere on the network. Then they have their own infrastructure to contend with. Let's ignore for a moment that their infrastructure isn't quite up to the task of 10x (or 100x) increases in demand.
The ISP suddenly is sucking down 10x more stuff than they were before. This upsets all sorts of nice balances they have worked out with peering arrangements and the like. So, now the folks they are sucking it down from - higher tier carriers - want them to pay fro all this extra bandwidth. What, did you think they just plugged in and got whatever they wanted?
Next we have the problem that for the last 10-15 years or so the Internet has been defined by web surfing and email and not much else. Sure it would have been nice if a few ISPs had been forward-thinking enough to build out 10x the capacity they needed to operate. You know, just in case some need came along. Suprisingly, this isn't a very effective way to operate a business.
Finally, in the US (and I suspect elsewere as well) the Internet has grown to the proportions it has primarily because it has been incredibly cheap. What started out as $25 a month for dial-up became $15 a month for DSL. Were these prices sustainable in the face of increased usage? No. Heck, they were sustainable in the face of any usage at all because it was to build market share and prove to the investors that this "Internet" think actually was something people were interested in.
Today, you have businesses paying $400 a month for a T1 circuit that is 1.5Mb while home users are paying $50 a month for 15Mb. The home folks are getting a deal based on the bandwidth not really being used. If you were paying for guaranteed bandwidth capacity, like the business with the T1 is, you would be paying lots more. Probably not $4000 a month (10x a T1) but no way would it be $50 or even $100 a month. Expecting to have 15Mb access 24x7 for $50 a month will get you disappointed. Badly.
The reality of the situation in the US today is that the costs are finally beginning to come down a little - like maybe $300 for that T1 instead of $400. But on the consumer front if the ISPs can't justify shared bandwidth where the average use is far far less than the possible maximum, today's pricing isn't going to hold. At some level there is a cost-per-Mb that isn't going to go away. If you want to be assured of 15Mb access with 15Mb being used constantly you are really going to have to pay for 15Mb. Today, you are paying for something more like 0.005Mb and the providers "know" that is the real level of utilization.
When the level of utilization changes, they are going to have to eventually upgrade the system. Eventually. This isn't going to happen overnight because of the costs involved. Should they have done it before? Maybe. But as of a couple of years ago the majority of use was still email and web browsing and everyone was happy with their 0.005Mb slice of the pie.
I'd bet on people getting more access capability but not a lot more total capacity in the near term. That means things like 20Mb bandwidth that bogs down a lot at peak times and caps on total utilization. I'd also bet on some big price changes coming down. You want to download 20Gb a month at 15Mb/sec? Sure, but you are going to pay. And start paying a lot closer to what dedicated bandwidth costs businesses today.
Re:Why isn't it treated lake any other utility? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Marketing isn't the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is that the BBC effectively threatened to put out of buisness any ISP that dares to try to throttle its iPlayer service by 'naming and shaming' any that do, and suggesting that all other content providers do the same.
I imagine that having trailers appear on bbc tv saying "and you can also watch this episode again via iPlayer (except on the following ISPs)" is going to be pretty damaging to business.
Of course ISPs oversubscribe bandwidth... (Score:1, Interesting)
Oversubscription is a completely normal practice in many industries. Case in point: the banking industry. The amount of cash that banks hold is typically only between 5-10% of the money that it owes in deposits, meaning if everyone tried to withdraw 10% of their money at once, the bank would go broke. That's called a run on a bank, and it almost happened to some UK bank not too long ago before the government bailed it out. However, we don't accuse the bank of 'fraud' or 'dishonesty' because normally, people don't all try to withdraw their money at once. In fact, banks are (traditionally) the links between the consumer and business side of the economy, since the bank can then take the money that was just deposited and loan it out to businesses so they can invest and grow, or loan it to you so you can buy a house. If banks didn't 'oversubscribe' deposited money, that would severely restrict growth since there would be a severe lack of capital.
As a service provider, it's perfectly right to take into account the fact that not everyone will take advantage of your services to the maximum extent possible. If ISPs did not oversubscribe at ALL, then you would be guaranteed to see higher prices for all consumers. That's a situation that benefits no one.
The fact that most ISPs (at least in the States) have an unlimited billing model reflects the fact that the available capacity relative to utilized capacity was very high in the past. If I recall correctly, unlimited access plans became popular around the mid-90s on DIAL-UP, when the pipe from the home to the ISP was probably very small compared to the capacity the ISP had to the rest of the internet. In this kind of situation, trying to bill people by the hour would have been uneconomical, since the costs of maintaining a billing system would have exceeded the benefit to both the consumer and to the ISP -- the ISP knows that even a heavy user can't really ruin things for others on the same local hub, and most users would have approximately equal use of bandwidth, since there's only so much you can fit down a dial-up pipe.
Now the economic situation's changed--ISPs have probably underinvested in infrastructure, so they ARE being limited by their own connection to the net. At the same time, the ratio of usage between the heaviest and lightest users has probably widened considerably than a decade ago. Billing people according to usage might make (economic) sense again.
I wish ISPs would be 'more honest' with their language, but it will probably take legislation or regulation to force them to do so. Assuming there's competition, an ISP that advertises 'unlimited' usage is going to look better than a competitor that's honest about bandwidth caps. While YOU may appreciate honesty and candor, it seems pretty clear that the distinction would be lost on consumers who don't read Slashdot
Re:Marketing isn't the problem (Score:3, Interesting)