"Hidden Costs" Of Watching TV Online?
- 2 Apr 08, 12:57 PM
According to The Daily Telegraph,
Britain's broadband usage has changed beyond recognition in a matter of months. Since Christmas Day - when the BBC launched its online catch-up service, the iPlayer - a trend towards watching TV on the web has grown enormously.
(A bit of theatrical licence can be granted: Britain's broadband usage has not in fact changed beyond recognition, but perhaps the expectations of broadband users have.)
A diverse number of players, from Channel 4 to MSN to Virgin Broadband have gone on record to say that this is a good thing: all on-demand TV boats are rising on the BBC iPlayer tide.
But many commentators have pointed out that some Internet Service Providers who offer "unlimited broadband" can start to charge their customers extra after only a few TV programmes have been accessed.
What's to be done?
The Telegraph suggested that users stream content rather than download to save money. We don't think this makes any difference.
As an aside, the BBC iPlayer service offers both streaming and downloading, and will continue to do so. Most programmes have a ratio of around eight streams for every download, but high-end drama, such as The Passion had over a quarter of its iPlayer consumption via the P2P download service. To reiterate, the BBC iPlayer is not, as the Telegraph keeps saying, exclusively a peer-to-peer download service.
So, if streaming rather than downloading is not the answer for users to reduce their chances of exceeding their monthly cap and ending up with an additional bill, what is?
How about a Broadband Charter? Here are nineteen potential actions that could help bring clarity to this issue, enable audiences to know what they're paying for, and help ISPs move the broadband market forward (in no particular order):
Internet Service Providers:
1. ISPs should be clearer in their marketing (Ofcom can help them). Unlimited broadband should mean unlimited.
2. There should be industry agreement on what you buy is what you get: for a start, an 8Mbs-1 tariff should deliver "at least" 8Mbs-1, not "up to". (I recognise the difficulties with the quality of the line and contention ratios etc., but this issue needs tackling).
3. ISPs which offer genuinely unlimited broadband - i.e., without a cap (or with very high caps) - should (and probably will) more aggressively use this fact as a key point in their marketing.
4. I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers. They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want. If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and which content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy.
5. There could be an industry standard for "high definition broadband". HD Broadband (working title) would be a minimum guaranteed speed of connection (probably 8Mbs-1). All ISPs could market the service (like Sky HD and Virgin HD) and drive up revenue per sub. If this happened, then...
Content Providers:
6. All content providers could create packages or tiers of HD content optimised for this new standard tier of "HD Broadband". (It might need guaranteed quality of service - or, alternatively, this could just be a marketing initiative rather than a regulated service).
7. Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid). I hope it doesn't come to this, as I think we (the BBC and the ISPs) are currently working better together than ever.
8. There are a number of functionality solutions which content providers can implement to lighten the load on the network which should help ISPs refrain from resorting to capping. One of these is bookmarking, which would enable us to know what programmes a user wants, ahead of transmission, and download them off-peak to the user's hard-drive pre-transmission (hidden and encrypted), to be ready to be unlocked immediately after the programme has gone out on traditional linear TV. We are applying to the BBC Trust to be able to offer this service for iPlayer downloads.
9. The best technical solution is usually Moore's Law, which has delivered massive reductions year on year in the wholesale cost of bandwidth and also reduced the bandwidth needed to consume a good quality full-screen TV picture (ever improving video codecs and compression algorithms have helped enormously). But BT Wholesale’s prices are regulated by Ofcom, and not subject to Moore's Law.
10. Although some have reported that we are exploring the costs/benefits of moving our content closer to our audience (potentially reducing much duplicated traffic, basically by putting BBC servers into the network), it is far too early to say whether this solution will work, or is even an appropriate intervention for the BBC.
11. We are already taking measures: we make it clear to users to check their ISP's tariffing structure: BBC iPlayer has a warning in its Terms and Conditions before you install the download manager. Further, a pop-up appears after 2GB of iPlayer programmes have been downloaded recommending that you check your ISP monthly cap.
12. Finally, we can either reduce the amount of content we offer, or reduce the quality of the programmes (by reducing bit-rate). As a fixed revenue company, this would be our only recourse if we had to pay more for distribution. This is not a desired outcome for anyone: my worry here is this could stop the rising spring tide of increasing supply, demand and consumption.
Users:
13. Subscribers should (and will) increasingly look for genuinely unlimited deals from their ISPs, and for ISPs that do not throttle bandwidth at peak hours, which can have the effect of causing streaming playback to fail to work correctly.
14. Users can set alerts on some ISPs to warn them when they have exceeded certain levels of monthly consumption.
15. Users should not panic unless they are very heavy users. Typical iPlayer usage (one programme per week per user) on a standard tariff on the UK's largest ISP (BT) would utilise 20% of their monthly allowance, and incur no additional charge.
16. Users should let us, and the ISPs, know their thoughts (hence this blog post).
Government and the Regulators:
17. You can't have a debate about this issue without reference to BT Wholesale (with whom we actually have a very good relationship). The ISPs which have their own network (Virgin) are busily rolling out 50Mb/s broadband. The rest have either installed their own equipment at BT switches (local loop unbundled – LLU), or simply buy capacity wholesale off BT Wholesale (e.g. Tiscali), and are, to a greater or lesser extent, beholden to the (regulated but quite reasonably profit-making motivated) BT Wholesale. There are those who are starting to ask whether, as with the regulator led introduction of LLU that was necessary to kickstart broadband in the first place, there is another sizable intervention required again now.
18. A less radical alternative to an intervention against BT Wholesale would be to encourage alternative forms of distribution. Ofcom is actively looking at everything from Wifi and Wi-Max to sewers, and exploring what encouragement and relaxation of regulation would be required to accelerate these nascent markets.
19. The regulators will undoubtedly determine whether this whole issue is structural, or whether what we are witnessing is that the ISPs are fighting a commercial war on a public policy stage, and that this has nothing to do with content providers or the BBC at all (indeed Ofcom, in their market impact assessment of iPlayer, believe that much of the increase in consumption over IP would happen anyway, with or without iPlayer).
I put down all these points to get the conversation going.
I'm not advocating them (except where I explicitly say so), but we are pulling together our thoughts here at the BBC, and liaising with the ISPs both individually and through the Broadband Stakeholders Group, and with the BBC Trust and Ofcom, so your thoughts on these points are, as ever, very welcome.
Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology
Comments
The Telegraph suggested users stream content rather than download to save money. We don’t think this makes any difference.
Err - it does, for two reasons. Firstly, and generally, a stream is all one way, so to stream a 350Mb file requires about 350Mb of traffic. A p2p system would reasonably be expected to upload as much as it downloads, so a 350Mb download would be 350Mb down, plus (at least) 350Mb up, so totaling (at least) 700Mb of usage.
Secondly, in the specific case of the iPlayer the Flash streams are significantly lower quality than the downloads, so they ought to be smaller.
This seems to me to be a very sensible draft towards a problem which is potentially going to be significant (until next generation technologies come along to increase capacity dramatically). It is clearly important to get all parties involved in this - government, telecomms, providers and users.
The latter is especially vital, since there seems to be a general sense in the media that the users are to some degree "victims" of ISP caps, when the caps are there quite clearly as part of the package purchased up front. Making users more aware of their responsibilities in relation to a finite resource - as the BBCs pop-up warning once 2gb have been downloaded - is perhaps the most important problem. I would be a bit wary about reliance on technology as a panacea; trusting to "Moore's law" to improve compression ratios and using "book-marking" are all very well. But they are papering over the issue: for example, if everyone bookmarks to download off-peak, the problem will be just deferred to a different time of day.
This sort of visionary leadership is precisely how the BBC can provide its justification for funding in the digital age. A good start!
I notice you don't actually mention the use of Kontiki in all of this, and the potential hidden costs to viewers using iPlayer download.
How many viewers are actually made aware by the BBC that you're using them to cut your bandwidth distribution costs with iPlayer download by having them be a "source" of the programmes being watched?
iPlayer download effectively puts the user in a position analogous to you saying "We'll let you watch this show on your TV - but you have to invite all your neighbours around to watch it through your window".
When (not if) ISPs start charging and capping user bandwidth more aggressively, how many average users are going to know that a good chunk of their bandwidth usage is going to be because they're being used as a peer to the benefit of the BBC?
Point 11 says iPlayer will lob a pop-up at people when they've reached 2GB of download - but what about the peer shared *uploads*?
It was only relatively recently that iPlayer download was redone so that it would stop sharing when it wasn't being viewed.
A lot of people probably wouldn't mind, after all online availability of programming *is* a good thing - but you're not exactly being up front about the impact - not to mention I haven't seen the BBC warn its users how impossible Kontiki is to remove for the "average" user if you don't want it.
And no, I'm not one of the Beeb Bashers, so please don't try to brush this aside with that as an excuse. Kontiki's foibles are well documented for one thing.
In this case, the BBC isn't just reporting the news, it's part of the story again. It really should make sure that how it's part of the story becomes better known - and your talking points above would be far more believable if they include questions about the BBC's involvement and it's own future in that regard.
(and no, I'm not going to give you a lame challenge of "Bet you won't approve this" - Either you will or you won't, you don't need any passive-aggressive attempt to "force" you to put this up. If you want to answer this privately, you can do that too, or you can ignore it.)
I think that there is a fundamental question that needs to be addressed in all this: universal availability (or not).
Does the BBC and do ISPs have to cater to the lowest common denominator or is it ok to keep going down the two tier model that has emerged, the impact of which has not really be felt yet?
There is a two tier broadband structure already in place (LLU and IP Stream) and the more traffic on the network, the more this will polarise and become apparent.
LLU works commercially for big ISPs in exchanges serving perhaps as much as 80% of the population.
LLU does does not work and will never work for rural users (I'm not talking about the North of Scotland here, this counts most people who live in small towns and villages throughout the UK with populations of less than 2,000 or so).
The problem highlighted by the Telegraph has been known by the ISP community for a number of years. In spite of which unlimited* broadband has been heavily promoted (*with caps or fair usage policies)...
For all of the dishonesty marketing unlimited* access, there is a real problem with true unlimited - gluttony.
If you don't have to pay more to eat more, you will find some people gorging themseles at the expense of others. That makes for a very inefficient model with a lot of wastage where almost everyone else pays for the abuse by a few.
The bandwidth crunch has largely been ignored because there was/is no pain, but at some point (eg when HD streams or downloads appear on the internet, or when people want to watch 1 hour a day rather than 1 hour a week of catchup), the 20% will not be able to participate. Is this fair? Do the 80% care? Does the BBC care?
At that point it becomes a question of subsidy - who subsidises the uneconomic access?
1) users paying hundreds of pounds a month for broadband because they live in small communities and half a dozen of their neighbours are HD-technofreaks?
2) ISPs subsidise within their customer base? Why? That would lose them customers in the cities to companies that don't sell to the villages and therefore are cheaper
3) Ofcom. A standard tax on all users to eliminate the issues in 2)4) content providers? The BBC is a special case - it does not benefit from additional volumes. ITV / C4 / Sky et all all do because they can sell more adverts. Be careful of the exceptional nature of the BBCs funding structure
5) government! Silly me - government money is free...
It is not a simple problem and certainly not a simple solution.
One final thought though... we use less than 2% of the aggregate local loop capacity and yet we have congestion at peak times on certain routes. The solution is in planning, not digging.
I don't see quite the point of trying to squeeze a size 12 foot into a size 6 shoe.
The fundamental problem about large-scale streaming of video is that the networks are not built to handle such data volumes, either in the access or in many cases the core - hence peak hour throttling and all sorts of sneaky tricks.
You can advocate things like bookmarking, better compression et al all you want, but at the end of the day, what we need is a shoe that fits the size of the foot - and ideally a shoe that has the capacity to grow as the foot grows.
The BBC iPlayer, as I see it, is a drop in the water in terms of capacity. Even the better quality downloadable programmes would not fill up the "8 Mbps" pipes so many of us are sold. But there are other services knocking on the door that would fill up that pipe to the point of bursting, and we can probably expect even worse to come in the near future. Xbox now offers HD films for download. What's a couple hundred MB for iPlayer content in comparison to several GB for one HD film?
We need new infrastructure, simply put. Noone has yet taken the bull by the horns (let's just wait and see how Virgin's "50Mbps" shapes up before we say anything about it), and it looks like noone is planning to in the foreseeable future.
Our fellow Europeans in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany and of course Scandinavia, as well as Poland, Slovenia, Estonia ... have all started building networks to suit these needs.
And if we don't, well I can't see how anyone could leave the battlefield unwounded, and the casualties will be many.
Personally I believe that bandwidth consumption lies with the ISP's entirely, the BBC is providing a service for consumers and if the ISP's don't allow their users to access that service (for free or very cheaply) then users will leave and go to an ISP which is offering consumers a better deal.
The ISP's can whine all they want but we're paying ISP's £30+ each month and the question has to be asked what the hell are they doing with that money?
They should get on with it and allow consumers access to fast internet connections and more bandwidth, otherwise they'll be left in the dust.
I agree that peer-to-peer uploading is the problem for users.
When I downloaded an episode of Torchwood, it both slowed my other downloading and caused me to come very close to exceeding my 5GB monthly limit.
On reading up on kontiki, I deleted both iPlayer download version and 4on demand.
I will watch programs on a streaming basis but will not download programs from the BBC under its current system
So the ISPs are going to have to go broke, carrying the BBC's content, and the BBC won't help them financially. Even thought they're going broke because they have to carry the BBC's content.
@Ishamel:"This sort of visionary leadership is precisely how the BBC can provide its justification for funding in the digital age. A good start!"
Let me parse this logic. Because the BBC refuses to stop its distribution channel - the ISPs - going bust, it needs more public money.
Huh?
I think the biggest problem is the serious lack of clarity concerning just what you do pay for with ISP's.
Advertising "upto" speeds doesnt provide much clarity, either the ISP has the network capacity to provide you with an advertised speed or it doesnt.
If the case is that consumers are demanding more bandwidth than is actually available then the only solution is to invest and upgrade. Clearly the market is there.
A charter would help with regards to some issues. But essentially a nicely worded, agreed document isnt going to overcome a lack of capacity and overall investment.
I think it would be a sad day when ISP's dictate what can and cant be viewed on the internet. If a shop runs out of milk does it tell us that we simply cant drink it anymore, ration it and advertise bottles containing "upto 500ml in certain areas, if your near a dairy, and you dont drink too much at once." Or does it simply make more available like every other business and let synergys and economies of scale help reduce the extra costs?
For me "Watching TV Online" is a must, simply because I could never sit in front of the TV and wait for the shows....
I wounder who can follow the TV show schedule.... may be a lot of people can, but I am not;so, the bottom line, Watching TV Online is a trend and is a must.
ISPS going bust
I don`t think it is the responsibility of content providers to finance the cost of downloading - public company (BBC) or other (Itunes, Virgin).
Like any commodity it is down to the consumer to decide what they want and how much they are prepared to pay for it.
What we do need is greater clarity as to what it all costs - and that is an ISP issue. There is still too much "mystic" over what they provide and how that translates into what you get.
It is a technical minefield and I don`t think the average user understands just what is involved - but the ISPs don`t help by not adequately explaining things.
My biggest gripe is over "up to" - you could in theory pay for "up to 8mb" and only receive 2mb, in which case you should pay for 2mb.
The ISPS should be clearer in what they are providing, and if necessary provide the appropriate tools - online or download - for users to monitor their usage. Most say "don't worry" - its natural to immediately worry.
Good blog.
John
Moore's Law is based around speed of computer hardware and not network connectivity.
You must have some network staff at the BBC and you should run articles like these past them for a second before posting them in future as getting the techy stuff correct is very important in trying to raise issues like this as a serious debate.
If you make everyone sign up to this set of measures - how will you differentiate on anything other than price? This will result in consolidation and a commoditised service. The more regulation you put in place the lower the degree of competition. Let the service providers decide how to differentiate themselves as the market matures. These debates are useful to inform the consumer and spur on the providers to create value added reasons other than price, but regulation is a slow death.
@Steve: ISPs are NOT going bust, and their main problem is advertising "unlimited" plans at rock bottom prices that anyone could have told them were unsustainable in the long run. Video over IP was ALWAYS coming, and bandwidth usage has always been growing. If they don't have the spare bandwidth to allow all-you-can-eat at less than a tenner a month they shouldn't have been selling it as that. I have little sympathy for what is essentially their own sharp marketing practice biting them on the behind.
Very interesting.
I especially like (not sure if I mean this tounge in cheek or not quite honestly) that fact that the BBC is seeking to effectively change the entire Internet/Broadband landscape in the UK on the back of its (fantastic) iPlayer service.
I totally agree that the market needs changing, and I totally agree that ISP's have had it easy for a long time, and have got themselves in this mess through poorly thought out pricing models. I'm quite happy that the growth in iPlayer is putting them under massive pressure. And I agree they need to put their house in order.
However (there's always a however!) for you to say that the impact on the ISPs is negligible is clearly rubbish, and this is perhaps the piece that lets the blog down. It isn't negligible - it is having a material impact on their business model.
Here's the real issue, and the reason for your post.....
Politically it would be very bad for the BBC to single-handedly kill off the UK ISP market through the success of iPlayer, and this article really just smacks of someone desparately trying to say 'it wasn't me, I didn't do it.....'
Actually it is you, and you are doing it. (But secretly I applaud you for doing so....).
Umm... why do you write 8Mbs-1?
Without a superscript for the -1, it makes no sense, just looks like you are trying to be clever and failing. Or confusing those who dont understand what you are trying to do.
8Mb/s is shorter, easier and clearer. You're a journalist, think like one.
omg the BBC's arrogance is amazing. You get around £3.5 billion a year stuff ISP's with p2p rubbish in your iplayer so it's constantly uploading on they're network and then start complaining. The sooner the BBC TV Licence is scrapped the better!
I welcome the BBC's involvement in the UK ISP market. It has taken many years for a big-boy to stand up to the ISP's of our country and call them to account.
The marketing techniques used by the UK ISP is nothing short of lying. How it hasn't come under the scrutiny of Trades Description I am baffled.
"Unlimited" -- should mean just that. No get out clauses when they cite a AcceptableUsabilityPolicy. I want what I think I am getting.
"Upto 8MB" -- as current campaigns by various magazines have shown, this is a nonsense.
In terms of the Peer-2-Peer, I believe this should be more obvious and be opt-in instead of automatic. I feel this is a practical solution, but because of the Limited-Unlimited service from our ISP, it can't work the way it is intend.
My sympathy for the ISP's in this manner is nil. They have preyed for too long on the consumers of the UK and now that we have a service in form of the BBC iPlayer that actually delivers something the vast majority will want, they can't deliver!
One of the issues in the UK is the way ISPs are interlinked. If I am with one provider and my neighbour is with another, even though we both use a LLU from BT, we only interconnect in London at an ISP peering centre.
I currently live outside the UK, in Germany. Unlimited, unless you are *really* overdoing it, does mean unlimited. Speeds seem to be a little lower than the UK but we get close to advertised bandwidth most of the time.
The iPlayer allows users to disable p2p uploading so this needn't be an issue. Of course, if everyone does then the whole thing grinds to a halt!
Virgin's 50mb etc is just a sales pitch. Their speed is capped if 'excessive' use is made in peak hours. 'excessive' is, of course, at their discression.
The idea that ISPs will suffer due to users actually using their service is bizarre. Most regular users (in my opinion) would welcome the option of paying a fair price for a fair service. Cut the small print and then charge for what users want not what ISPs are willing to offer. We need a range of products from light occassional surfers to heavy p2p users with prices to match. Not headline 'speed' claims which do not bear scrutiny, especially when capped.
Sir,
"The best technical solution is usually Moore’s law, which has delivered massive reductions year on year in the wholesale cost of bandwidth"
How does Moore's law, a law which purports that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit board rises exponentially, have anything to do with the carrying capacity of copper or fiber wire and its bandwidth?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Sir,
"The best technical solution is usually Moore’s law, which has delivered massive reductions year on year in the wholesale cost of bandwidth"
How does Moore's law, a law which purports that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit board rises exponentially, have anything to do with the carrying capacity of copper or fiber wire and its bandwidth?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
The reason for this situation is that 5 years ago, marketing at some big name ISPs looked up the average Gb's downloaded per user, per month on their networks. They took this figure and worked out how much BT Wholesale will charge them for that data, then add on their own margin - voila - £15 a month broadband and it can be sold as 'Unlimited'.
The problem is that what people did on the internet 5 years ago is very different to what they want to do now. BitTorrent, iPlayer, iTunes, bigger service packs, facebook, online gaming - all suck up more bandwidth. Users expect this as the service says 'Unlimited' for £14.99 a month.
The issue has grown through greed at the ISP management level and the most appauling lack of knowledge and foresight from the marketing department. ISPs have dug themselves this hole. They invest in more infrastructure (which costs so they won't), or more realistically they continue what they do with caps and throttling. Make sure that the end-users know this, and ensure that there are more expensive packages that have reduced / no caps / throttling. I pay £28 a month for my ADSL 8Mbps connection. It's very fast, great customer support and a 50Gb cap per month during peak hours. No throttling, and unlimited during non-peak hours. But I'm paying twice as much as what Tiscali advertise as 'Unlimited'.
God-awful Marketing departments and greed have caused this situation - let the greedy ISP's die off (Tiscali, VM, BT, Sky) with their poor customer service and amazingly crap networks - whilst users that want a decent service pay a bit more for it.
Moores Law? I think you may have misunderstood it a little. Or not even read it.
I'm with the 800lb gorilla and Steve above; Highfield's post betrays an utterly unwarranted hostility and combativeness to ISPs who have very real concerns over the massive increase in bandwidth costs that will result from streaming and P2P distribution of bandwidth intensive content. The BBC seems intent on forcing them to foot the bill (or pass it on to their customers) for the BBC's content delivery, or go bust. It's basically a load of threatening bluster, combined with fingers-in-ears-la-la-la-I'm-not-listening childishness. If the BBC wants to use ISPs as its delivery mechanism for bandwidth intensive applications like the Windows-only Kontiki package, it should be prepared to shoulder some of the burden of the increased cost rather than leaving the ISPs to hike costs for all their users (even those, like me, who after a brief flirtation decided that Kontiki was a pile of poo and got a V+ box instead) or go bust.
It shouldn't be a matter of whether the BBC contributes to a new Content Delivery Network, but where they'll place the delivery servers (and I'd suggest as close to the network edge as possible); if they don't want to go it alone, why don't they cooperate with other distributors like 4oD, C5, Living etc? Some of whom even use the same aforementioned pile of poo that is Kontiki.
By the way, Moore's Law refers to the number of transistors inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit doubling every two years, and has damn-all to do with bandwidth costs. Relying upon that when what we actually see in the UK is some slight increase in headline speeds accompanied by massively increased traffic management and ever more restrictive "fair use" policies is just dumb. Guess what? Contention ratios aren't going to vanish just because Highfield says "WAAAAAH! NOT FAIR!". Neither are FUPs. CRs certainly actually serve a useful purpose; they allow a potentially higher speed a lot of the time for significantly less cost. Of course, if Highfield WANTS everyone to have to pay for a 1:1 contention ratio, then he should try getting the users to fork out, say, £700pm MINIMUM for a leased line. Tell you what, I'll be kind and allow him a 10:1 CR - that'll be £300pm for SDSL. These ARE synchronous connections at 2Mbps, not asynchronous at up to 8Mbps, mind, but given that the BBC's business model in this regard is predicated upon leaching our upstream bandwidth to distribute their content (because that's how Kontiki works), trust me, you're going to NEED synchronous... Looks a little less reasonable now, eh? Unfortunately, that's what bandwidth costs and as someone who buys leased line connections for business I have to explain in short words what synchronous connections are, what contention ratios are, and why no, one can't wave a magic wand and pull out a 10Mbit, 1:1CR, completely unlimited connection out of one's ... hat :)... for the same price as a crappy home ADSL link with a 50:1CR and a 10GB FUP. Shame no-one thought to explain that to Highfield.
So let me get this clear:
The normal solution for this is peering agreements, as an ISPs costs are generally related to traffic outside their core network. This peering doesn't however reduce costs as BT Wholesale charge for all traffic, even that originating within the ISPs own network?
So shouldn't the solution be to proxy the content somewhere within the BT Wholesale network that BTW will agree to reduce the transmission costs?
Am I wrong, or is BTW the problem here? And if so, does this not affect providers like Be* who don't use the BTW network?
It is somewhat disingenuous of the BBC to start throwing around comments that "8mbps-1 should mean AT LEAST 8mbps not UP TO", since at the end of the day this issue is hardware infrastructure dependent, and it is almost impossible for an ISP to guarantee the download and upload speed available to any one address.
Example. My home and office are both served by an "up to 8mbps" connection provided by Karoo in Hull, and both are served from the same exchange.
My office averages speeds of around 6.5mbps for downloading, whilst my home (which is 2 miles further away) averages between 4.25 and 4.5mbps ... more than adequate for my need BTW, including iPlayer streaming on a regular basis.
My home connection is also noticeably quicker after around 11pm than it is before that time, so clearly it is affected by other users.
ISPs do need to be clearer on how their packages work, but my contract's fair use policy clearly states that I can download up to 20GB per month without any problems. Beyond that, Karoo reserve the right to increase the contention on my connection to reduce my useage until the end of the month at which point it will go back to normal and my GB count starts again from zero.
What internet users need to get through their heads is that the bandwidth we enjoy in increasing volume does not come free. The infrastructure, servers, routers IP ranges etc. all have to be paid for by someone, and we need to get away from this sense that we are all entitled to do this without paying for it.
At the end off the day it all boils down to the ISP's. They offer all these "unlimited packages" which really are not unlimited. To me and every end user Unlimited means unlimited there is no caps and no restrictions.
The BBC shouldnt have to do anything or help any ISP's with funding or additional methods to reduce bandwidth.
As mentioned above the ISP's have dug themself this hole and its up to them to get out off it instead of asking for funding or help from big content delivery providers ie Iplayer, 4OD etc.
Its good that the BBC has brought this issues clearly in to the public domain name.
Why are ISP's allowed to advertise unlimited broadband when they are clearly limits either fair usage or throttling.
Neither the BBC or any other content provider should pay ISP's for carrying their content. If an ISP's pricing is unsustainable then change their pricing. It is not the BBC's job to fund a failing business model and provide state aid.
If the ISPs cannot afford "unlimited" plans on the prices they sell, they can cap the amount of data transferred and charge extra for usage above the cap, or charge their customers more for a properly unlimited service that means what it says. They should not be extorting money out of the content providers.
If they did try to charge the providers, one might end up with the ludicrous situation where one broadcaster's content is more expensive on AOL than Tiscali, but another's the reverse. This is ludicrous: it would be like BP charging me more for petrol depending on whether I drive a Ford or a Renault.
BBC should supply software, which can be installed on an ISPs premises (at the ISP's expense), to cache BBC's content and provide a better service to BBC's users, and of course reduced costs to the ISP. If the BBC was interested in providing a quality service for their users, they would have this in place already.
Any P2P service which fails to provide a reasonable means to for ISPs to proxy data (and users to circumvent it if the ISP's cache is lousy or corrupt) is just being inconsiderate, and is quite frankly asking for trouble.
Why do we have the net? Not all users want access to every bit of content, common users, in my experience, will get connected because they want to use specific services; Amazon, Online Banking, Tesco, iTunes, Xbox Live, BBC iPlayer, BBC News, YouTube, Email.
Whilst users will, from time to time visit other websites it tends to be a select few they favour and use as applications more than anything. Consumers pay for access to this content by paying ISPs to give a good SLA with a high QOS, sadly doesnt always happen.
The fact, the disbelief, that ISPs could charge the high level content providers which are the founding motivations for users to get connected is daft. Without that rich content, surely we wouldn't want to get connected?
I wouldnt consider companys like Apple to take a charge for me using the iTunes service, I dont want to pay for the content, iTunes be charged for the content delivery causing an increase in the overall purchase - lets just stay offline and get a CD!
ISPs and content providers both need each other, for delivery of content and content to provide. The end user should not incurr any charges over what they have already agreed with their ISP.
@ Nick Palmer "The BBC seems intent on forcing them to foot the bill (or pass it on to their customers) for the BBC's content delivery, or go bust"
That's entirely the right attitude.
Customers pay ISPs for full internet connectivity or a package limited in capacity. If ISPs can't deliver that then their advertising is fraudulent, and "going bust" should be the least of their issues.
You say "content providers" but only mention broadcasters. Why? Google (in the form of YouTube) and Microsoft (in the forms of various Windows taffic) both use up more bandwidth on the UK internet than all the broadcasters do (including the BBC). But no ISP is going to go to those companies for money, because *that's what the ISP's customers are paying them for*.
The solution to this is very simple - much more of a legal mandate on ISPs advertising what their packages actually deliver, and let the market sort it out. Any ISP that tries to ask for money from content providers and cuts off access to those who don’t pay up will find themselves bankrupt very quickly as users rightly desert them in droves. Any ISP that responds to the technical challenges will succeed.
There is a massive requirement for market education and surely the BBC is best placed to facilitate this. The vast majority of users buying the broadband service have no idea what’s involved in supplying it – they just want a reliable internet connection that delivers what they need when they need it, the fact it can vary in performance and potentially in cost is often quite a nasty surprise.
The fact that there are two quite different parts to broadband – appears at first to be of no interest to the end user.
(1)Access – normally telephone lines from the exchange
(2)Backhaul from the exchange to the internet, usually provided via the BT network then into the ISP’s network
However you need to understand this and the fact that there are very different factors affecting them.
(1)Telephone lines are not normally shared and the speeds achieved are determined by physical limitations of the copper, the distance from the exchange and even how many users are activated in a specific area – as this increases cross talk when degrades performance. Nearly all the copper lines in the country are leased by Open Reach (BT) on a fair an equitable basis to ISP’s – the cost doesn’t change how much the line is used and the performance is pretty constant. The only way of improving the speed is to install new equipment at the exchange like ADSL2+ or replace the copper with fibre optics – a very expensive prospect that may happen for the majority (but still not everyone) in 10+ years time. There are some other prospects for improving performance by bonding lines together.
(2)The backhaul connects the exchange to the ISP’s data center and then onto the Internet. BT wholesale sells what they call a central pipe to ISP’s which connects all the exchanges in the country to an ISP. Alternatively ISPs can do it themselves (LLU) – but then they pick off selected exchanges and organize their own routing of traffic onto the Internet. Either way the cost of setting up the backhaul network is high and BT is regulated to ensure they do not undercut the LLU’s. As this part of the service is contended (shared) the more people use it the more performance drops – so that is why speed performance varies over time. As overall traffic levels increase due to new applications like iPlayer ISPs need to add more capacity and this costs more per user – which is why ISPs are concerned as many of them have sold services on the basis that you can use it as much as you want for a flat fee, this is just no longer practical for a business trying to make a profit, so they will have to change.
What you're proposing abdicates your responsibility and pushes your bandwidth problem onto the ISPs and users.
The iPlayer (as good and frustrating as it is) uses a crappy clone of P2P for distribution:
- You need to give people the option of how much bandwidth is used for P2P distribution and when - have a look at uTorrent for a good example of this.
- You need to insert content distribution boxes into the ISPs network to reduce their traffic particularly the backhaul costs (or use a CDN)
There are other ways it could be improved too:
- work with the ISPs to roll out
multicast.
- work with the other broadcasters to build a single iPlayer type service
- Improve P2P so that clients on the same ISP prefer each other where appropriate
The UK is a joke when it comes to broadband capability and it is laughable.
Thought the ISP's are guilty of deceptive marketing, the real issue lies in the infrastruture that the ISp's are reliant on being so poor.
Congratulations on putting poor ISP's in their place, I have been working in the ISP industry for a good number of years, for some bad and currently an excellent ISP.
Me and other Savy users have been pointing out for years that ISP's that keep slashing prices will not be able to sustain their networks when content providers get their acts together and provide a popular service.
This has now happened and the average bandwidth used by customers is now starting to look like the bandwidth that the so called "Heavy Users" used to be. This was because those's users were early adopters of technology which is now becoming main stream.
These short sighted ISP's now are ill equipped to meet their customers growing demand, they cant afford to supply the bandwidth at their prices because they were banking most customers not using a lot at all.
Sure the cost of BT central's and LLU back haul plays a part in this but if ISP's charged reasonable prices from the get go they wouldn't be in this situation.
If they charged content providers to not be restricted they are essentially blackmailing content providers saying we have the customers you pay us for them to get your service. Totally ignoring the fact their customers are already paying them for this access.
The BBC are working on a content delivery network to help these ISP's because they haven't been forward thinking enough.
Personally I would like to see the naming and shaming, because far to many people who don't understand the industry think that these ISP's are fine, they can't be that bad, or just plain don't know the difference. Naming and shaming from the BBC could help people become aware of just how bad the providers they are with are.
It is interesting (or should I say sad) that when the BBC comes up with a bold, exciting and revolutionary (yes, revolutionary) product like the iPlayer, that all some people can do is moan. This time they are moaning about the bandwidth. Broadband is supposed to be all about video and audio. So Highfield has the guts and vision to give us what we ‘the people’ want, and that’s why it’s a success. If consumers don’t want to use the iPlayer then they don’t have to. If ISP’s want to throttle it down to make it unusable then I think they should be named and shamed. If my ISP does that I will move to an ISP that does not. If the BBC was led by some of the negative people I have read here, we would still be sitting in our front rooms eagerly waiting for our ‘tubes’ to warm up each night.
Since you are so keen on ISP's providing sufficient bandwidth for this service to work flawlessly could you explain why the BBC took the decision to only stream a low quality broadcast but allow a p2p download of the high quality version? Does that mean that the BBC, while preaching to the ISP's to provide sufficient bandwidth, is at the same time not willing to purchase enough bandwidth of its own to meet the demand of consumers?
If the BBC provided sufficient bandwidth then the p2p aspect of the service could be removed, reducing the levels of bandwidth consumption for the end user enabling them to view more content on their own current packages.
In addition whilst agreeing with you about ISP marketing campaigns advertising "up to 8mb" services and then not delivering, I believe either you do not understand the issues of attenuation/noise margins that are the result of cable length and a million other physical factors and determine the maximum level of service a user can get, or else you decided to mention them in such as way as to make them seem trivial problems to further your own ends.
This article smells like buck passing on the part of the BBC towards the ISP's.
The ISP's need clearer usage policies. The BBC needs to get its on shop in order before it tells ISP's how to operate.
I’m finding myself agreeing with most of this post.
The problem is, really, twofold:
1. BT Wholesale charges by some denomination of the byte, and is rather pricey
2. ISPs claim “unlimited” when they really mean “limited”.
What I can't get my head around is all of the people criticising the BBC for the iPlayer; it's nuts. There's clearly demand for it, and the BBC is paying its bandwidth and hosting costs (and it pays a reasonable amount, last I checked!), as are the customers; why should either of the two be held in contempt for using what they're paying for?
Umm... why do you write 8Mbs-1?
8mbps download. 1mbps upload.
Seems straight-forward enough.
Peering / proxying - isn't this unnecessary in a p2p environment? There are p2p streaming apps too. Sopcast for example.
Dear Mr.Ashfield,
Your reference to a law that relates to semiconductors and not to bandwidth demonstrates you have neither the journalistic ability or technical knowledge to continue your tenure at the BBC as a "senior member of the Future Media Team"
Perhaps you should start writing about something you do understand.
Isn't this mainly a problem related to the cost BT Wholesale charges the ISPs? It's cheap to get the content from the BBC (peer on LINX) but getting it to the ADSL users via BT is where it is hurting the ISPs. ISPs that did LLU are going to be in a better position because they aren't tied to BT's crazy Mbps rates.
The elephant in the room is the wholesale pricing structure imposed by BT for their ipstream product.
This is a DSL wholesale product, and most ADSL retail operators (i.e. ISPs) use this to interconnect their networks to the DSL network throughout Britain. And it is difficult to come up with superlatives which adequately describe the pricing model for this service. "Outrageous" misses by a mile; "exorbitant" is in the wrong ball park, and "crippling" doesn't go nearly far enough to explain its effects on ISP cost models.
There is indicative pricing available on http://www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/ioi/bbpricing/model.pdf. For larger ISPs who would need multiple 622Mbit/sec connections, the wholesale cost works out at an eye-watering £200 per megabit of capacity per month or £1.5m per circuit per annum. By way of comparison, IP wholesale transit can be picked up for about £8 per meg per month at this sort of speed.
What's even more extraordinary is BT's policy of charging more per meg at higher speeds than for lower speeds. This completely flies in the face of any reasonable business expectation.
This pricing would be made less unpalatable if the service quality were any good. However, with SLAs of 15 weeks for delivering 622Mb/s back-haul circuits to interconnect with this service, you seriously have to wonder what sort of time-continuum the company operates in. Read more on http://www.btwholesale.com/pages/static/Products/Internet/BT_IPstream.html. It's quite extraordinary stuff.
No. DSL reseller ISPs operate on a razor thin margin which is imposed on them by an appalling wholesale regime. iPlayer has now tipped that margin the wrong way around, and ISPs are going to start losing even more money than ever before because of this situation.
In one respect, the BBC should be congratulated for releasing iPlayer, because this may create enough political pressure for Ofcom to get up off their bureaucratic bums and actually do something about this monopolistic abuse rather than pursuing the policy of the three blind monkeys. Once thing's for sure - until BT reduce their pricing to something less ridiculous, either prices are going to rise significantly, or ISPs are going to go down like flies.
nick
"7. Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content worked best on (and which to avoid)."
How would such an endorsement square with the BBC's Charter obligations to remain impartial?
Reading most of the replies, it seems a lot of people are saying ISPs getting it in the neck is a "good" thing because of how they do business.
One minor problem - Those ISPs won't actually get hurt very much, because they'll just pass the costs on to the customers.
And at the end of the day, the BBC will not only still be "co-opting" ISPs to handle broadcasting (through peer sharing) of iPlayer downloaded content - but the users will end up having to pay more because of the BBC - a shadow tax on top of the license fee?
That UK broadband providers make vague promises they had little way of keeping, then weasel out of implied commitments with hard facts is not in dispute.
But in that respect, the smaller providers face a similar problem that potential providers in Australia do with Telstra - There's only one real game in town, in the shape of BT.
So it's not really very helpful to see the spike in bandwidth use as being somehow validated because of ISP business practices, because it's a "punishment" on them that will not improve matters for users.
As for Moore's Law, I think Highfield was using the informal corrolary - anything to do with computers doubles in size/space/speed/capability every two years.
Which still smacks of an attempt to appear to be a geek when he's actually management. But hey, it's not his fault he's not PFY material, he works for the BBC fer Goddess' sakes :P
Whatever the ISPs have done in the past, it still remains that the BBC is using users to avoid having to pay distribution costs, and the costs of it are going to end up on the shoulders of the users themselves.
How does this extra cost measure against the license fee, and did the BBC *really* expect no-one would notice that it's effectively turned users into affiliates, without really explaining the ramifications?
ISPs in the US recently tried to solve similar problems with attempts to get high-bandwidth sources to pay for access, the "net neutrality" debate.
I have to wonder if something similar isn't going to be attempted in the UK as a result of this. Google/YouTube and other providers might be sourcing a lot of data, but the BBC is the only one I'm aware of that's deliberately tried to reduce its costs by passing the burden onto the users themselves.
It's a shame that Mr. Highfield has only just realised the impact the iPlayer has had on usage levels (and even then, he's dismissing the actual levels of increase some ISPs have experienced). Perhaps he might have the foresight next time to involve key players BEFORE he releases something as mainstream as this? I doubt it though, he's very much marketing this as the ISPs problem rather than the BBCs problem. That's a very good attitude to have.
In summary does this blog not just say "we the BBC want you the ISP to carry our broadcasts for free" and go on to poke sticks at the ISPs because some end users might actually have to carry the cost of the BBC's traffic ?
Hoping to phase out that expensive transmitted network are we ?
Here in New Zealand we pay for our internet by the byte, so if something like iPlayer were to take off here, then we the customers would be charged for its usage, and the ISPs have the funds to pay for the network capacity to make it work.
Whereas free unlimited internet may be nice, its not a sustainable model as more and more bandwidth intensive applications come on line.
I do find it curious that iPlayer is repeatedly described as a problem for ISPs. I can see how an increase in traffic could cause them a few headaches in the short-term, but, ultimately, ISPs are in the business of selling bandwidth, and anything that increases demand for their services has got to be good news for them.
Is Ashley Highfield really as appallingly technically ignorant he appears from this blog? Or is he just a complete Troll (someone who deliberately posts outrageous comments in order to provoke an argument)? Either way, I can't see how he is fit for a senior job in such a technology-driven part of the BBC.
The earlier contributors cogently present a sensible discussion of the very real problem of bandwith costs and limitations in the UK, but those who only read the original blog get a distinctly biased viewpoint. Unsurprisingly, this presents the BBC as the hero and the ISPs as the villains.
'Unlimited broadband should be unlimited' and "an 8Mbs-1 tariff should deliver 'at least' 8Mbs-1" are particularly egregious, for the reasons rehearsed in the more technical posts. Fair enough to say ISPs should deliver what they advertise, but he ought to know that means changing what is advertised far more than it means changing what is deliverable at current prices. But of course that does not fit his agenda of pretending that everyone can have as much content as they like delivered for peanuts.
@Peter Oliver & Andy L:
You're fundamentally mistaken; everyone wants bandwidth, but no-one wants to pay what it actually costs. Read Hugh Conkey's post immediately succeeding yours. Then my post (#17) above. Bandwidth costs money (and to Andy L above, if you think that a short vid of a cat on a skateboard or mobe-captured footage of some teenager in Iowa squeezing his zits has anywhere near the same bandwidth costs as even a standard definition TV program, put down the crack pipe and back away slowly... ;) ). The ISPs want to sell you bandwidth, sure, but if you were suddenly told that your broadband connection would now cost £300pm, since your ISP was now obliged to provide you with a dedicated 8Mbits of bandwidth all day, every day, contention ratios and fair use policies having been declared unlawful, you would go ape**** and be demanding that you got your connection for the £15pm you used to pay. You would then be told "sorry, can't afford it, we're out of the broadband business". Then it would occur to you to think "not everyone's using all of that bandwidth all the time - there ought to be a way of sharing it out so that we can have it cheaper". Then you'd get told "Yep, that's a contention ratio; clever, innit? Well it was, before people like Ashley Highfield sold everyone on the idea that bandwidth was free and everyone could have as much as they wanted all the time and that it was only eeeevil telcos that were stopping them."
ISPs are in the business of selling bandwidth, you bet, but as a business. BMW are in the business of selling cars, but if I went in and offered them £5k for a split new M5, I doubt I'd get very far...unfortunately, the perception appears to be that you can have BMW broadband for Tatra, hell, pushbike prices, and you can't.
Yes, BT's wholesaling provision needs shaking up, but bandwidth still costs a hell of a lot even where the ISP's traffic is unbundled and doesn't go over ipstream. Highfield et al's posturing and bluster isn't doing you any favours; it won't automagically slash the cost of bandwidth; it won't abolish contention ratios and give everyone a fibre connection to their home. All it does is attempt to duck all responsibility for a problem which is only going to get worse, rather than do the sensible thing and try to find cooperative ways to alleviate it. If the BBC continues on this tack, there are several possible outcomes:
1) The ISPs traffic manage iPlayer and other similar services into oblivion. The BBC can name and shame whoever they want, but if no ISP's prepared to carry their traffic, it won't do very much. That'll hack off the iPhanboys, but the rest of us'll go along as normal.
2) The ISPs give in and attempt to carry iPlayer and other similar traffic over their existing infrastructure, causing fairly massive degradation of other services that people use their internet connections for (web browsing, email, online gaming, ecommerce etc). Those of us who don't give a rat's posterior about iPlayer will get screwed with degraded services for the sake of those who want to use it and and everyone else can go hang.
3) The ISPs are forced to upgrade their network to cope with the iPlayer traffic, but receive no assistance from the originators of that trafficv to do so. You get what you want but we get screwed with higher charges to pay for the upgrade.
Of course, the breathtakingly daft idea that the BBC might actually demonstrate some responsibility and seek a cooperative resolution with the broadband providers doesn't seem to have impacted, does it? The BBC are not the only bunch to use Kontiki; C4 and (I believe) C5 at least do. They COULD discuss with the other players and the broadband providers the possibility of jointly investing in a content delivery network, that is to say staging servers at the local exchange level for delivering the content they want distributed. That would take the pressure off the network backbone, ensure more rapid distribution to you people who want the service, not cripple other peoples internet services to provide it, nor result in ludicrous increases in costs. There would be SOME investment required, but shared between all the above companies, the impact would be a lot less. You'd get what you want, the rest of us would get the services that we actually use, and no-one would be being screwed (well, not anywhere near as much)to provide it. So the problem with that is what, exactly?
I don't see why the BBC should be held responsible for the increase in bandwidth usage as such... after all, they are simply providing a service on the Internet in the same way that lots of other providers do. YouTube anyone?
The fact though is that a large majority of consumers will go for the cheapest option. Some large ISPs chose to sell their broadband services at prices which were below cost in order to make market share, and presumably hoping to sell value add services on top to make money. They can afford to do that, because they have plenty of mad shareholders willing to stump up the cash.
The smaller ISPs then have a choice... they either try to match the big boys on price ( sure, they can add a little on for "better service", but not much ) and risk going out of business, or they charge what they need to in order to actually make enough money to survive and get no retail customers. I can confirm that the wholesale price of connection to BTs broadband network for smaller ISPs is in excess of 200 pounds per megabit per month - think about that the next time your ISP throttles you because you've been using 8 megabits/sec for the last week.
Still, I don't think that it is down to the BBC to decide on how ISPs run their business. It is down to ISPs making sensible charges and MAKING THOSE CHARGES CLEAR. Had they have done so then I am sure that Ofcom would have re-assessed what BT can charge for wholesale by now. Oh, and for those who say that the BBC are avoiding paying for enough bandwidth themselves - the cost of transit bandwidth is ( as has been pointed out ) an order of magnitude less. Plus the BBC directly peer with most ISPs in the UK and so in theory they have plenty, and it costs them very little relative to the cost of all of the broadband backhaul.
One thing no-ones mentioned is that the BBC is paying for the increased bandwidth when the streaming content leaves their servers and joins the Internet Backbone. This is usually via a high capacity link that they pay someone for.
The ISP's and wanting the BBC to fund the other end rather than their customers paying for what they use.
The BBC does not pay for your TV, Ariel, Set-top box or Satellite dish so why should the ISP's expect the BBC to pay for someone's internet usage.
Errr...Sean? That'd be why they only make low bitrate poor quality video available directly from their own servers (which is a bit more like Youtube)and use the P2P capacity of Kontiki (that's the bandwidth YOU pay for) to make available the high quality version (which is more like bittorrent).
It is simply not possible to provide peak-hour on-demand TV to millions of households over the existing largely copper wire ADSL network, and no amount of criticism of ISP's is going to change that. However, it is possible to distribute programmed TV. Given the small cost of hard disk storage, it would be better for the BBC to stream programmed ADSL content and sell a recording set-top box. The user would see much the same benefit as on-demand TV, since he could then choose from hundreds of GBytes of personally profiled material recorded automatically at off-peak hours using existing bandwidth. Otherwise, the only way to provide mass real-time on-demand TV with the existing infrastructure, is via satellite.
@Alan Hewat - I'm with you on the possibility angle, if what we're looking at is either centralised distribution via streaming or P2P bandwidth leaching like Kontiki. I still reckon that a LOT could be done with content delivery servers near the network edge.
There's a typo: "We don'[t think".
Please accept this post.
It is complete nonsense that ISPs expect the BBC to contribute to the costs of BBC content being made available online. What we are seeing here is the downside of aggressive business practices on behalf of the ISPs - promising the earth and hoping people don't ask for it.
Its very easy to jump up and down and point fingers at the BBC as they are to an extent publicly funded and a softer target than true commercial ventures, however the BBC are not the only people putting out large amounts of popular content that users want to transfer. Before iPlayer it was Youtube and increasingly in the future it will be iTunes (TV, music), XBox Live (movies, games), Steam (games), Joost (TV) and all the other content providers that are appearing. To pick one organisation and hold them not only responsible for the shift in trends but culpable for the additional costs the ISPs will have to bear is both disingenuos and ridiculous. For that organisation to pay a levy when others do not, even proportional to their traffic volumes, is unfair and very much a case of the ISPs searching for a scapegoat.
There are two "fair" ways of tackling the problem from the point of view of the content providers. Either they all pay or none of them do. Seeing as how the internet is a global medium, and content providers are not necessarily bound by the same laws and governing bodies as the ISPs and users, it seems impractical to mandate that UK content providers pay a fee to UK ISPs to aid delivery to the users. It would effectively constitute a tax against UK businesses only and either suppress online creativity and success in the UK, or drive it overseas.
Alternatively, the ISPs could accept that they are just feeling the sting of a business practice known as "overselling". This essentially means that they sell more packages than they have capacity for on the assumption that many people will use their service at a bear minimum level, and the average usage will be at a level they can comfortably afford. Unfortunately for the ISPs, they have underestimated the effect that high-speed connections has had on the way users and businesses interact with each other. In any industry other than IT, this would be seen as a monumental blunder on behalf of the ISPs, but many people just don't understand the concepts wrapped up in the jargon. If I were to run an "unlimited" taxi service with 5 cars, I can serve 5 people at a time. If my market research tells me that people only use a taxi once a week, I might decide that I can take on 5*7=35 subscribers since at any one time I'm statistically still going to be only serving 5 people with my 5 taxis. It is quite clearly a gamble, but one that should pay off, and my taxi company has 7* the amount of revenue it would have had if it played conservatively. This is how the ISPs have done business in the past, and it has worked out reasonably well for them. But to continue the analogy, a new restaurant has opened in town and everyone wants to go to it every night. So my market research is now totally invalid and my taxi company is overstretched. In this scenario, it would be laughable for me to go the restaurant owner and demand that he pay for additional taxis for me because his popularity is putting too much strain on my company. And yet, this is exactly what the ISPs are doing to the BBC. When you take the jargon out of the equation and boil it down to the underpinning business concepts, its pretty clear that the ISPs don't have a leg to stand on.
This post is a really good roadmap of the problems facing all parts of the internet, from the provide, to the distributor to the user, and potential ways of tackling these issues (albeit the post is slightly dodgy in places on the technology - Moore's law is an observation not a solution and relates to the current broadband crisis parenthetically at best, and it would be very hard to use current technology to give an "At least X" speed guarantee). This is a debate that has been going on worldwide for a while now and is one facet of the wider "Net Neutrality" argument. I think by far the best idea in the post is that of naming and shaming the ISPs that engage in disruptive practices, and I think its quite telling how defensive the response to that idea was by the ISPs in question. I really think that the more that can be done to dispel the "unlimited" myth, and the other marketing-speak terms that aren't really reflective of reality, the better, and the sooner the ISPs realise that they need to alter their business practices to cater to the new way the public uses their services the better - even if that means higher, more realistic, costs to the end users.
There are two distribution methods on iPlayer.
a) Lower quality streaming, which does not use p2p and is streamed direct from the BBC
b) Kontiki-driven p2p, for higher quality downloads
What is interesting is that the ISPs are complaining because their customers are *using* the very facility they are being paid for. If what the ISPs are charging the customers is not meeting the costs, then they either have to reduce the costs (capping, throttling, etc) or increase what they charge.
Some would argue that p2p messes up the economics of the ISPs business. Notwithstanding that the likely lions share of iPlayer bandwidth is streaming not p2p, believe it or not, James et al, p2p provides a fairer way of paying for this bandwidth. By using p2p for this content, the costs are borne only by the people who want this content. Not the majority of iplayer users who are using the streaming service, or the vast majority of BBC viewers who don't even use iPlayer.
If the p2p usage is increasing the ISPs costs, then as I already stated, they either use throttling or capping to reduce those costs, or they pass the costs onto the end user who is making use of the p2p technology. That seems entirely fair.
The problem is that these greedy ISPs have been advertising a lie for a long time. The unlimited internet they have been selling to people in reality isn't unlimited. So they can hardly turn round to the people who are making use of their "unlimited" service and ask them to pay more because they are using more, can they?
The hole was dug entirely by the ISPs concerned. They were promising something that could not be sustained. And now, they're crying because it's hurting.
Nick Palmer wrote
>>
3) The ISPs are forced to upgrade their network to cope with the iPlayer traffic, but receive no assistance from the originators of that trafficv to do so. You get what you want but we get screwed with higher charges to pay for the upgrade.
Actually, I pay BT Internet for 20GB/month, and it costs far more than 2GB/month. That should count for something.
And throttling the connection to 40kb/s, which BT do at peak times, simply means that my usage goes on for far longer (and affects the contention ratio for far longer) than it would if it allowed me to download the programme I wanted to watch at full speed, which I can do between 0015 and 0730. [Note to BBC: a nice upgrade to iPlayer would be scheduled downloads]
I'm not going to say anything about firewall configuration to stop upload traffic, of course...
I am surprised to see the horror some people are showing at the idea that the increased costs involved with online TV should be passed on to the user. Of COURSE they should be passed on to the user - the user is the person who pays for what they use, just like they pay for the electricity to run their TV and for the disks their DVDs come on! The BBC isn't causing any additional traffic - it's the users who cause the additional traffic - why should they the BBC pay for it? The BBC is simply making its programmes available - it's up to the user to get it onto their machine, via the ISPs that the users pay to provide that service. To ask the BBC to pay for it would be like asking supermarkets to pay for the shoppers' taxis home!
I won't get into the "ISPs have been conning us for years" debate as everything I feel about the ISPs dishonest practices has already been said. My point is simply that users should pay for the service they use. This is even MORE true in the case of the BBC, where the licence fee already forces non-users to pay for it. Of course, just as ISPs should be more honest, so the BBC should warn people, before they download anything, about the uploading requirements of the P2P.
As to the comment about Moore's Law - don't be so pedantic! Regardless of it's strict definition, it's generally understood that the "Moore's Law" can be used very vaguely to mean the rapid, RAPID improvements in all aspects of Information Services year on year, and I think that is quite applicable.
Congratulations to the BBC on I-Player. I think it is revolutionary and will change our viewing habits forever. For me, the thing that was a breakthrough was getting it to work on the family TV (using a series of cables and adaptors!). Now, when we miss a popular show on a Saturday night, we can watch it whenever we choose in the week. By the way, I find the streaming version only slightly poorer in quality than the downloaded version and still acceptable. Interesting announcement today about the hook up with Nintendo WII - this is much more likely to be connected to the family TV than the PC - clever move!
I think as you say I-Player will help TV On Demand generally and wake the public up to the possibilities.
If we are going to have to pay more (nothing is for nothing) then maybe IPTV is the way forward. Perhaps I-Player is the equivalent of the walkie-talkie (free but limited) and will lead eventually to a GSM like solution.
It is complete nonsense that ISPs expect the BBC to contribute to the costs of BBC content being made available online. What we are seeing here is the downside of aggressive business practices on behalf of the ISPs - promising the earth and hoping people don't ask for it.
Its very easy to jump up and down and point fingers at the BBC as they are to an extent publicly funded and a softer target than true commercial ventures, however the BBC are not the only people putting out large amounts of popular content that users want to transfer. Before iPlayer it was Youtube and increasingly in the future it will be iTunes (TV, music), XBox Live (movies, games), Steam (games), Joost (TV) and all the other content providers that are appearing. To pick one organisation and hold them not only responsible for the shift in trends but culpable for the additional costs the ISPs will have to bear is both disingenuos and ridiculous. For that organisation to pay a levy when others do not, even proportional to their traffic volumes, is unfair and very much a case of the ISPs searching for a scapegoat.
There are two "fair" ways of tackling the problem from the point of view of the content providers. Either they all pay or none of them do. Seeing as how the internet is a global medium, and content providers are not necessarily bound by the same laws and governing bodies as the ISPs and users, it seems impractical to mandate that UK content providers pay a fee to UK ISPs to aid delivery to the users. It would effectively constitute a tax against UK businesses only and either suppress online creativity and success in the UK, or drive it overseas.
Alternatively, the ISPs could accept that they are just feeling the sting of a business practice known as "overselling". This essentially means that they sell more packages than they have capacity for on the assumption that many people will use their service at a bear minimum level, and the average usage will be at a level they can comfortably afford. Unfortunately for the ISPs, they have underestimated the effect that high-speed connections has had on the way users and businesses interact with each other. In any industry other than IT, this would be seen as a monumental blunder on behalf of the ISPs, but many people just don't understand the concepts wrapped up in the jargon. If I were to run an "unlimited" taxi service with 5 cars, I can serve 5 people at a time. If my market research tells me that people only use a taxi once a week, I might decide that I can take on 5*7=35 subscribers since at any one time I'm statistically still going to be only serving 5 people with my 5 taxis. It is quite clearly a gamble, but one that should pay off, and my taxi company has 7* the amount of revenue it would have had if it played conservatively. This is how the ISPs have done business in the past, and it has worked out reasonably well for them. But to continue the analogy, a new restaurant has opened in town and everyone wants to go to it every night. So my market research is now totally invalid and my taxi company is overstretched. In this scenario, it would be laughable for me to go the restaurant owner and demand that he pay for additional taxis for me because his popularity is putting too much strain on my company. And yet, this is exactly what the ISPs are doing to the BBC. When you take the jargon out of the equation and boil it down to the underpinning business concepts, its pretty clear that the ISPs don't have a leg to stand on.
This post is a really good roadmap of the problems facing all parts of the internet, from the provide, to the distributor to the user, and potential ways of tackling these issues (albeit the post is slightly dodgy in places on the technology - Moore's law is an observation not a solution and relates to the current broadband crisis parenthetically at best, and it would be very hard to use current technology to give an "At least X" speed guarantee). This is a debate that has been going on worldwide for a while now and is one facet of the wider "Net Neutrality" argument. I think by far the best idea in the post is that of naming and shaming the ISPs that engage in disruptive practices, and I think its quite telling how defensive the response to that idea was by the ISPs in question. I really think that the more that can be done to dispel the "unlimited" myth, and the other marketing-speak terms that aren't really reflective of reality, the better, and the sooner the ISPs realise that they need to alter their business practices to cater to the new way the public uses their services the better - even if that means higher, more realistic, costs to the end users.
Looked at the BBC offering, seems I can watch the item for 7 days and only on the BBC approved player. Prefer to use Videolan to get full screen and nothing but the film. Plus can watch a film in 3 months time from alternative services.
Currently with an ISP that is fairly unlimited, one chap tried to download 1 TB, he left for some reason
Virtually all the major updates to library are carried out overnight and not at peak times when the net is at it's slowest, something to consider ?
The ISP's have been getting fat on other people's content for quite a while now - let's face it, if there wasn't free content on the internet the ISP's would have very few customers.
The fact of the matter is that no ISP is willing to increase its prices first - If they did they would quickly loose market share to cheaper rivals. They know they are not allowed to collude and fix prices between each other because that is against competition law, so they are in a bit of a bind. However, pricing choices and capping/throttling decisions are up to the ISPs.
It is not the BBC's fault that no ISP dare to blink first and provide products that appear unattractively priced in comparison to their competitors. That is the market at work!!!
For those idiots that think it is reasonalbe for the BBC to have to pay to pass its content through the ISPs, then it would be equally reasonable for the banks to have to pay ISPs for carrying internet banking, or for newspapers to be charged by ISPs for carrying news.(!)
It is a complete joke that ISPs think that the BBC should pay for their additional network costs. If an ISP cannot support users fully utilizing their connections 24/7, then they shouldn't make such bold claims that the service is 'unlimited/unmetered' in the first place. 'Unlimited bandwidth' also applies to uploaded data, and thus claims that programs should be streamed, instead of downloaded using p2p technology, are again moot.
If regulations are put in place that force content providers to pay ISPs this will be extremely damaging and will mean that less well funded content providers will be forced out of the market (see the whole 'net neutrality' debate).
BBC IPlayer is one of the best things the BBC has produced in a long time, please keep up the good work.
I don't think that the BBC should have to pay a fee to the networks, it's their job to provide the bandwidth they offer, but I do think that the BBC should work with them to get the network infrastructure up.
I'll admit I don't know how the network works at that top level, but it seems that by a clever use of multicasting you should be able to reduce the strain quite significantly (after some work - I'm not sure how you would get that working with flash) - and surely they can proxy some of the data themselves.
At the end of the day, if their backbone connection to the BBC isn't fast enough then you should have to pay for it - it's your internet connection, but if it's that their datacentres can't handle pumping the packets out to us then it's their fault - we pay for "unlimited" broadband, and if they have underestimated web usage then that is their mistake to make.
Paul seriously.... theres a quite MAJOR difference between your last points.... think of the bandwidth requirements of banks etc compared with the iplayer, they are negligible!
The BBC SHOULD pay ISPS for this, after all they are stupidly publically funded still, although thats another issue altogether. If they weren't funded by public money then they probably shouldn't offer any assistance.
Mr Highfield appears to be living in a dream world with a lot of his ridiculous suggestions, the impact on ISP's is quite major... perhaps you are too old to understand all this new technology?
This is pretty damn trivial to untangle.
ISPs are paid to provide bandwidth. Every packet of data moving over the internet comes out of the provider's upload capacity and the recipient's download capacity. The provider and the recipient have both paid their respective ISPs to enable that transmission.
And, errrm, that's it. If the ISPs are under-charging, they need to change their pricing models. If they don't have the infrastructure, they need to invest in it. If BT Wholesale are screwing them around, they need to get a grip and drum up some consumer support. If they're relying on people not using their "unlimited" package, they need to find a workable business model.
I've paid for my bandwidth. You've paid for yours. The BBC have paid for theirs. If the result is unpalatable to the ISPs they need to work out how they've managed to screw themselves and fix the problem. Blaming third parties for their own short-sightedness is not the answer.
I am amazed :
1. That the BBC can use the potential for distribution of content on the Internet to simply provide repeats and not original or tailored content. The BBC license fee/ charter etc. is predicated on the BBC's access to broadcast channels. If it experiments with (relatively) free methods of distribution i.e. the Internet for the broadcast of mainstream content rather than the scarce resource of broadcast frequencies then it should at least be diplomatic in response to any problems its experiments cause.
2. That the Director, BBC Future Media & Technology does not understand the nature of the present network performance of UK Broadband. The network has always been built on the basis that the usage would be for bursty web type content and not the likes of large-scale streamed video distribution. To quote the BT Wholesale Service Information Note that describes the service that most ISPs retail to their customers
"The products are not suitable for End Users who require continuous bit-rate, fullbandwidth services."
3. That the BBC has done so little to facilitate and promote video on demand (or services approaching it) through the methods of broadcast distribution that only it has at its disposal. Where are the experiments from the BBC bringing together interactive DVB/Freeview video delivery and interactive deeper content via the web?
4. That anyone could describe the problems that arise from distributing already broadcast high-bandwidth content compromising the distribution of lower-bandwidth more innovative content as part of a
"rising spring tide of increasing supply, demand and consumption."
I do agree this is a problem the ISPs should solve themselves.
I am quite happy to see a discussion starting on this in the UK.
In Germany, we have had this same problem like 4-5 years ago, when ISPs where throttling download speeds or kicking users for too high traffic. They have solved this problem, without being payed by content providers, or having unreasonable tarriffs. Nowadays, nearly everybody is on an unlimited contract for sth around 15euro/month, which does indeed mean unlimited, no matter if you download 500gb a month or even more.
It's just a matter of upgrading the equipment etc. and keeping up with the pace of the development of new technologies etc.
In fact, it's not BBC's fault British ISPs can't handle the traffic. Why should the BBC be punished for ISPs being greedy?
Ashley,
How much does the BBC pay Astra for satellite capacity and uplink services per year?
How is this debate any different?
Typical BBC "lifer" attitude and out of touch as ever.
The BBC pay for all their other distribution methods so the internet should be no different. Why should ISP's have to pay up when the BBC is swimming in public money?
Highfields attitude is so out of touch it stinks. No grip on the real world at all.
The BBC Bashers are missing the point as usual. The ISPs have been selling Broadband services as the means to enjoy rich media content - why upgrade if you're only emailing? Now we've found content we like(thanks, iPlayer), the ISPs tell us they can't actually deliver it after all. So no sympathy from this punter.
How much "tax" does YouTube/Google pay the ISPs? Yep, none. And how much bandwidth is used for illegal downloads (answer - dramatically more than that required for iPlayer), and how come the ISPs aren't doing more to clamp down on that?
"How much does the BBC pay Astra for satellite capacity and uplink services per year?
How is this debate any different?"
It's different because anyone watching Satellite TV isn't already giving Astra £20 a month explicitly for "unlimited" access.
YouTube and Microsoft both use more bandwith on UK ISPs than iPlayer does. So why should the BBC be fixing up broken business models?
This discussion is very similar to the Net Neutrality debate being played ot in the US. Should ISPs have the right to block, squeeze or charge for content & applications that go over "their pipes".
In the US, the discussion frequently focused on Google, and also VoIP players like Skype.
Here in the UK, it's more about iPlayer because there's more competition between ISPs and they're not precious about avoiding cannibalisation of voice minutes as they (except BT Retail) don't depend on telephony.
But the fact of the matter is that all this has BEEN PREDICTABLE. Anybody running an ISP business over the last 3 years must have been at least NAIVE and possibly INCOMPETENT if they didn't see an imminent risk from a wildly popular video service. YouTube has been an even more stark warning over the last 2 years. It's turned out to have been the BBC that's tipped the balance, but it could have been Sky, CNN, or some startup in California or Bangalore.
In other words, very high bandwidth consumption caused by TV downloads or P2P was a CLEARLY PREDICTABLE RISK. This hasn't come out of the blue.
Anyone who failed to see this risk, or failed to plan how to mitigate it, doesn't have a leg to stand on.
BA didn't plan Terminal 5 as well as it should, and it's suffering. The banks didn't plan for predictable mortgage defaults, and they're suffering too.
Bad prediction = Bad planning = Bad business = Risk of going bust. End of.
Hold on... don't Virgin Media customers pay them for their service? They promise for your x pounds, you get y speed and z bandwidth. So if the bandwidth is paid for by the user why is virgin asking for more? Are they just double dipping and trying obtain extra money from suppliers or else restrict bandwidth(isn't that called extortion?)
Who next ? google, would be a good start.
The debate about net neutrality is coming to the fore here, and I think its time we set up a campaign to educate people about their rights....
As for virgin, face it guys, the bandwidth is already paid for, but frankly with your premium rate (25p per minute support line) and your insistance on spying on your customers and cutting off their internet if they are caught downloading; I think anyone who is still a customer of virgin deserves what they get.
Any attempt to charge content providers for distributing content would undoubtedly lead to providers reducing the bandwidth used by lowering the quality, availability or amount of programmes. Once people are used to being able download their favourite programmes easily and quickly at high quality, any degradation of the service will lead them to look elsewhere, from legal p2p to illegal p2p. The 350MB per show will become a minimum rather than a maximum, as 720p content is 1.1 to 2gb, and the traffic would boom. People would notice their favourite shows off sky and download these as well.
Also, as it has been mentioned, the ISPs offer a max speed and a download limit/fair use policy. I definitely agree that a minimum speed should be part of the deal (contention ratios are usually published though). If a user is within their download limits / FUP, that is what they have paid for. If they exceed this, they get charged or their speed gets capped. The only thing that be costing the ISPs more money is people actually using their entitlement, which is what should be expected.
The ISPs cash cow, free ride is over and they have to start advertising what they are actually going to provide.
Businesses simply shouldn't sell things that they can't really provide hoping that nobody will notice, if they want to avoid bad surprises. Especially in a fast moving market like this.
This story is really educational for an Italian: too many people down here continuously bitch about how lame broadband access is and how in Northern Europe things are run THAT MUCH better thanks to better business practice and more liberal laws. Instead, here I see happening a "typically Italian" thing: companies that initially earned a lot of money and then landed in a world of trouble promising things they can't really sell go crying to the State asking for it to mend their own mistakes.
You have to have a TV license If you have the Internet so why dont the BBC expect to pay ISPs for service???
I am the CTO of a specialised ISP. We deliver content on behalf a wide range of Content Providers (not the BBC) who PAY US to do this for them. We deliver over 100 million streams of video each month for our clients.
We subscribe to public peering infrastructures that comprise the internet which in turn goes towards building the Internet as a whole. The money we charge the content providers for delivery of their content in turn grows the internet and increases the quality with which the content is delivered.
Providing this access to the content therefore increases the value of content providers brand (and its attractiveness to advertisers or subscribers). This is seen as the Return On Investment for the Content Provider and this creates a complete and symbiotic relationship between the ISPs and the Content providers - while providing great entertainment for the end-subscribers.
Unlilke EVERY OTHER content provider The BBC has a slightly wierd view that 'because of the unique way it is funded' it shouldn't have to pay service providers for delivering its content - in fact it was so keen not to that it decentralised the cost of delivery (which it could easily centralise if it was willing to pay) onto the Kontiki P2P platform meaning that end users have to pay, even only from their monthly limit, to distribute the BBC content. So the end users are paying, the BBC is seeing a return and there is NO investment in the ISP despite all of this.
One thing that the BBC fails to mention in this arguement is that a UK Subscriber ISP has to ensure that there is a TV license held by any subscriber before they install an Internet Connection, since these days an Internet connection is deemed to be a technology 'capable of delivering a TV service'. (Even many ISPs are not aware of this).
This means that EVERY ISP Subscriber is ALSO paying money to the BBC - so why do the BBC not expect to have to PAY the ISP for delivering thier video: they pay the terrerstrial broadcast networks and satellite networks and facility line service providers: Why not the ISPs?.
So to recap: The BBC drives a high demand for its content through advertising and promotion of the iPlayer. They use a p2p technology that means that ISP subscribers effectively pay for the distribution of the content and not the BBC. The BBC also gets around £10 per month from every Internet Service installed from the license fee that is a requirement - even if there is no TV at the location. Further, they expect not to PAY ISPs for the disproportionate increase in traffic that they are driving.
And they they have the nerve to stand on a public forum and imply that the ISPs are being 'uncharitable'...
It is amazing how the BBC can misuse its huge influence to suit its own purposes.
I would also like to point out that the Internet Service Providers do not generally consider themselves to be overselling their services. For the same reason that companies buy (for example) 6 phonelines for an office of 30 people DSL networks have been rolled out with contention (shared resources in the network) as part of the design. Without this every user would have had to buy / pay for a 'leased line' and broadband would still be in it infancy. It has always been clear that DSL services work in this contended way. When a content provider like the BBC creates a demand for P2P content like the iPlayer has then ALL areas of the network (particularly the 'edges' near the end users) get congested even if this is just repetative re-distribution of the SAME data time and time again. This 'chews up' all the otherwise available bandwidth and since the network edges are in the control of the end users and not the ISP (traffic shaping etc is difficult with P2P) it causes congestion and therefore service problems. One of the reasons why streaming is more popular than downloading is that a stream can be managed from the central servers to the edge much better than a download. The only problem, for the BBC, is that in th