ISPs vs BBC iPlayer: Missing the point?

Totally agree...

...after all the BBC will be paying upstream and hosting costs themselves. If this is BT's attitude, then the like of the BBC / Amazon should cross chage them for cost of servers, staffing and drive space, after all they are providing services that make people want to get broadband in the first place.

Should Amazon charge the Post office due to giving them business? No?

Should BP be charging Ferrai for producing thirsty cars therefore using their petrol stations more often? No.

If BT retail cannot provide the service the customers want for the price, then simple economics, you have to up the price or cut the service. However the thieving low life marketing scumbags that promise "unlimited" broadband should have their ponytails cut and be forced to read the Complete Oxford dictionary from start to end 100 times.

Agree entirely

ISPs have been selling their packages on the ability to watch video and download huge quantities of stuff since what feels like the late 90s. I don't see how they can complain when customers actually do that.

I do understand the need to throttle at peak times as an interim solution to ensure that everyone can get a bit of bandwidth rather than completely denying some users because someone' downloading films. However, it would be nice if ISPs can provide a real time indication of exactly how and what they are throttling.

How do they justify

How do BT justify this demand for money? They have the most expensive broadband packages around, more customers than most (economies of scale, etc) and crappy speeds and FUPs.

I'm with Be, where none of that applies, where you can happily download several GB in a night and they're not moaning about how they can't afford to provide the service, despite providing a much faster, cheaper, more reliable service than BT (this isn't an advert for Be but I'm making a point).

So how do BT justify it? Where does all of the money go? If BT Wholesale are charging them too much for the broadband, perhaps they should consider LLUing their own exchanges?

Hmmm

This article may originally have been posted on Enta's opinion site but the link at the end of the article took me to a different article when I clicked it, and right now the opinion.enta.net site simply hangs indefinitely :(

Whilst I do entirely agree that BTwoolsale are the biggest villain in this picture, I can't help wondering if

1) this is the same Entanet that used to offer 300GB/month off peak allowances that were clearly neither technically or economically viable

2) this is the same Entanet that bought bigtime into the BTwoolsale much overhyped 21CN story, much to the later distress of their end users?

Other than that, yes, BTwholesale are a bunch of under-regulated overpriced technically and managerially incompetent (just ask AAISP) monopolists.

Enta themselves don't appear to be a great deal brighter based on what I've observed.

They already pay

At the data centre the BBC are already charged for their share of the bandwidth

The ISP has simply sold futures in bandwidth to their customers and lost the bet...

So if the ISP's really clued-up this wouldn't be an issue!

If the ISP's policed their networks to stop all the Botnets, etc with the same zeal that they are using against "rich media experience" tools they would have one heck of a lot more available bandwidth. But there would be no posturing, sabre rattling, etc in that would there? Face it, if they ran clean networks that fixed the solution of promiscuous Botnet traffic, the whole of the Internet would be far better off.

This is the dirty little secret of the ISP industry doesn't want in the press -- the fact that they won't do SFA to stop the Botnets.....and they have not only the technology and the wherewithal to do so.

Paid in full..

Surely the BBC have paid for their own internet connection in full. Any traffic that goes over this leg is already accounted for.

If BTs customers are using BBC iPlayer a lot then surely that is something between BT and the customers. Customers are likely to leave BT in droves if BT start banning services and reducing access to certain services, seemingly on a whim.

Frankly, I think BT are shite and always have, so it's not a problem for me.

Article somewhat isses the point too.

Its the ISP's who are running unsustainable business models with no planning for increasing demand. I havent seen any stats but I would be willing to bet that Iplayer actually didnt spike the overall bandwidth demand curve for the last few years. There will always be increasing deman for bandwidth.

Basically they are selling their products too cheaply. Instead of throttling they should be offering base package with some capacity growth planned in.

The ISP's have got themselves in this mess with an unsustainable price war. Its up to them to dig themselves out of it.

BTW actions are fairly irrelevant. It doesnt matter whether they charge £5 or £50, the ISP's are selling on at a price where they cannot cover their costs. Basic business FAIL.

It's all balls

They take money to let us have internet access and whine when we use it? :D

Also, don't most decent ISPs have local caches of Youtube + iPlayer to cut the traffic right down?

Hypocrite

"the [service] they want at the price they expect"

If they hadn't been advertising unrealistic levels of service at unrealistic prices and relying on customers not trying to actually use what they'd been sold, then people wouldn't be expecting it now would they. ISPs only have themselves to blame for this.

Idiots

Arrgh - I can't stand the telecoms industry - these people are such fascile idiots.

BT et al bitching and winging about the BBC's iPlayer service shows how truely ignorant they are

Their argument is the equivilent of the UK Highways Agency demanding Ford & Honda etc pay directly for the cost of the motorways because their customers are buying too many cars...

Go BBC - love your service, tell the ISPs to get a grip and do their jobs properly.

Someone - just shoot BT - lets put them (and us) out of their misery

Bound to happen sooner or later

The situation was entirely predictable from years ago and is not an easy one to solve. At its heart is the question of who pays for what. Unless we all are given more bandwith than we need and not charged for use Net Neutrality is just a utopian dream.

To imagine we will get free access is equally so and once people are paying they want to know why they are paying to subsidise others, so the notion of tiered packages comes into play, and goodbye Net Neutrality.

Maybe we could embrace the dream of unlimited bandwidth for all but who's going to pay for it ? We live in a capitalist world not a socialist utopia which is the root problem and that isn't going to change any time soon. Why should bandwidth be any different to provision of other basic utility services ?

Net Neutrality is a socio-political issue which won't get fixed by bleating that wholesale providers aren't playing the game how we like, nor laying the blame on any particular group in the chain. To get Net Neutrality you need to have a society which supports it and that means a major shift in mind-set and outlook at the highest and across all level.

BT

..has always been naff, well done for noticing! ;)

I totally agree that the ISPs should cover their own costs. It's virtual costs anyway. The real cost is updating their networks... which they're not likely to do. The costs they talk about are not costs at all, it's the fundamental lack of capacity in their home stretch hops.

Really it's just BT qq coz they will have to spend some money on plugging in a few fibres and pulling their fingers out over local infrastructure.

lastly, :) content providers already pay to provide content, it's called peering and the BBC is already linked directly to BT backbone, so there is no extra cross-peer charges for BT to pay!

Eat all you like, or PAYG

The current model used by ISPs is the same as that of an 'Eat all you like' Chinese restaurant. Some will stuff themselves silly, others will eat a normal amount and some will be fussy and eat virtually nothing. All pay the same price.

Now that is fine until all the fat people descend onto this EAYL Chinese restaurant. It wont be able to cook food at a fast enough, and will eventually go out of business.

PAYG makes more sense from a business point of view. And from a consumers perspective, if the unit charges are reasonable enough, say 50p per 1GB, I would have no problem paying that. The trouble is ISPs will inevitably get greedy and they will charge much more.

Pot and kettle debate relative luminosity?

Most of the ISPs whinging about the iPlayer have content provider ambitions, and serve up their own videos (that I suspect few customers actually bother watching). If the ISPs complaints were genuine, they'd be squaring up to Google over Youtube. Yeah, right. This smells like a Digital Britain land-grab - an attempt to top-slice some of the licence fee.

Funny really: the content providers claim the BBC is anti-competitive, and that the ISPs collude in piracy. The ISPs want to charge the content providers for access to pipes that they are already paying huge comms costs for.

Will no-one think of the poor customers?

The TV license funds delivery of TV content to my screen. IF the ISPs keep whining, maybe the Beeb should become its own ISP and deliver iPlayer through licence-fee funded pipes.

So...

... I pay my ISP for an agreed amount of data transfer.

If I choose to use that up on non-mainstream, insignificant traffic sources, then they have no problem.

If I choose to use it with mainstream, significant sources they want the source to pay too?

Isn't that the ISP trying it on to be paid twice for the same thing?

Perhaps if the ISPs that are struggling to deliver what they've clearly oversold, they should try realigning their retail prices to their costs rather than all leading the race for the bottom of the sewer. By judicious choice of ISP, you can actually get what you pay for.

A parting thought paraphrased, from the mid-19th century, for those in the beancounting department and marketing departments of the whining ISPs: Income 20 shillings, expenditure 19 shillings and sixpence result happiness. Income 20 shillings, expenditure 20 shillings and sixpence, result misery & ruin.

Other missed points

Has everyobne forgotten contention ratios?

I always understood that I was paying for a connection with a specified top speed (and I don't like the "up to 8MB" advertising), but I was sharing network capacity with other customers.

It works well if everyone is reading web pages. Nobody wants a continuous stream of data.

Downloads are a bigger problem, but few are going to suffer if a Linux download is slow. Streaming video is different. It needs sustained bandwidth.

If the ISPs want the BBC to pay for delivering iPlayer streams, won't the BBC expect them to provide the capacity needed to deliver the product?

If the ISPs can't deliver, why should they be paid?

Correct me if I'm wrong but...

don't the BBC already pay for their upstream (and downstream) bandwidth?

Or do they get a completely free ride piggybacking someone elses connection?

Basic economics

I will be the first to admit that my grasp of basic economics is weak. But does anyone else think there is something flawed in the idea that if demand is strong and growing at the current prices, that a wholesale supplier should be thinking of decreasing prices? Surely if demand is high, then a wholesaler's price will be high to maximise their revenue.

Aggressive competition in residential broadband market (where some of the products are 'free') has kept the price to the consumer low, then margins for the ISP will get squeezed and this might result in complaints that they are charged too much for the underlying service. But basic economics would teach us (and I've just read a short article on it so I should know!) that this is perfectly normal and is no reason for BT Wholesale to decrease prices.

To my mind BT Wholesale will only decrease their prices if forced to by competition (reduction in demand for their service) or regulation (in the absense of competition).

Or is it me? My brain hurts now. Need tea.

Paris. Because she probably understands this better than I do.

Hmm...

As an ex-Enta customer I really do take pretty much all of what Enta say with a pinch of salt. I do agree that it's not up to content providers to pay the ISPs (I mean they're already paying for bandwidth as it is), but on the other hand, well, just have a look in the Entanet Thinkbroadband forums at the many unhappy customers and you'll see why I left.

Maybe Enta should sort out some of their own customers issues before going on about other ISPs.

Rob

Just to play Devils' Advocate . .

"Basic economics teaches us that, when demand is high and growing, providing bandwidth at lower prices will allow it to generate profit"

Doesn't basic economics also tell us that when demand is high and growing there is ample opportunity for profiteering?

Old world meet new world

The BT of old, the TELCO, could oversubscribe their systems because on telephone exchanges it is a pretty safe bet that not all subscribers will be using the phone at the same time (unless dancing on ice is on or it's new years eve, try getting a landline connection first time then!).

BT the ISP started by using the same kind of mentality, I mean in the early days when people were on dial up, not everyone was online at the same time and the backhaul could cope.

Now people are on broadband, always on and want to use more content rich sites the backhaul simply can't cope.

ISP's cannot (and should not be allowed to) sell unlimited packages simply because they don't have unlimited resources. The marketing droids will still try to use weasel words, fair use policy etc but there HAS to be limits. the sooner ISP's start selling sensible packages with sensible limits the better.

The global Telco / ISP I work for sells communications to businesses, if a business wants a 10 Mbps internet connection then it can have EXACTLY that, if they want to spend all day watching iPlayer or downloading torrents then they can do that, we don’t care.

One thing you can bet your arse it will cost an awful lot more than £20 a month :-)

An ISP is an Internet Service Provider, that is they provide a subscriber with a connection to the internet. If they don’t have the facilities to back up the number of subscribers they have they should stop taking on more subscribers, upgrade their facilities to meet demand or place sensible limits on what subscribers can do.

unlimited adj 1 "not limited or restricted."

BT sold unlimited packages, on terms they dictated to their customers.

They should be held legally to their contracts, just like ordinary people are, and perhaps learn from their mistakes (yeah right).

The rocky road

BT dont like services like Iplayer as it takes people away from buying BT's own tv services, Its ona par with mobile broadband providers telling me I cant use Skype over the connection (or any other voice services)

We pay for our connection and we pay a licence fee for I player content as well via the TV Licence.

And will BT be asking facebook, twatter and the rest of the content providers to cough up as well? Given the amount of video crap posted on arsebook, youtube etc etc I player probably isnt that relevant.

I doubt it as they dont have the wedge whereas the BBC do, plus BT;s obsession with Phorm hits the problem that they wont be able to deliver targetted ads on the BBC website so they need some revenue from the Beeb from somewhere.

If BT invested more than plastic cups and string in its backbone infrastructure this wouldnt be a problem but why do that when theres hefty profits and bonuses to be had!

Paris, her infrastructure has a large capacity

bloody idiots

What a bunch of wankers, I pay my internet connection (O2), the BBC I imagine pay their bills too, and I pay the license fee. What exactly is BT moaning about? They have been selling us "unlimited" web connection then do not want us to use it?

I would like to see ISPs providing reasonably priced symmetrical connections, where you are charged according to what you use. This way heavy users like me (5 adults in the house, all with computers, all using voip/iplayer/youtube/p2p) will pay a fair price for our use, and get good service in return. I mean, 1mbps upload? That's shite! We'll get much better p2p (legal and, yes non-legal, but then you're paying for up/download remember! no more seeding for weeks on end), better voip (so what if it damages phone sales, all telecom comps sell web connections and they can buy shares in voip companies) and all round better internet experience. Now why would we want that?

Unlimited isn't really the problem...

Everyone keeps harping on about how the problem is the "unlimited" packages. This isn't quite the case, as if everyone was limited, we'd still have the same problems. Why? Because everyone gets home from work in the same few hours of the day and goes online. It's not the quantity of data transferred overall, but the quantity within a certain few hours of the day. This is why ISP's, an example being virgin media, throttle connections during parts of the day and especially in the evening.

The result even if we do pay for quantity rather than speed, is that we all still suffer, because we all want the allocated bandwidth at the same time and the ISP's just can't provide what they've advertised.

What needs to be done, rather than ISP's whining about this crap, is for them to start charging more. Yes, this sucks for the customer, but if they're charging more, they can then afford to expand their network capacity, and we'll all start actually getting that service we're paying for. Maybe, just maybe, we'll even be able to beat them about the head enough to stop with their rediculous capping policies.

The first step, if you ask me, would be having the regulations changed so that when advertising broadband they have to say "At least xMb/s" rather than "Up to xMb/s", and specify the slowest possible speed the customer is going to get, INCLUDING the capped rates! That would at least give the customer a fairer insight into how fast their connection is going to be when they actually want to use it (which would be at the same time as almost everyone else). Wouldn't it?

Exactly

It should be BT thinking the "Free Ride" is over. They advertise "unlimited" access to the internet, not specifically to low bandwidth websites. This is what happens when you don't bother upgrading your infrastructure and insist on a business model that is based on oversubscribing their service.

Suddenly they've realised that people are now capable of using their 8Mb service, and using up all of the 30GB "unlimited" data tariff. Instead of working out how to improve & modify their service to keep customers happy, they're now trying to screw money out of a Government underwritten broadcaster. You don't see them going after YouTube.

Not really surprising that they hopped into bed with the recording industry at the drop of a hat, they're both working on similar out-dated business models.

As an aside, they're a bunch of inept wankers. I've spent the last 8 weeks diagnosing network issues. They finally believed me when I said there was no possible way that our ADSL issues were a result of any fault equipment in our building. An engineer was finally sent out and found that the problem was due to a hardware fault in the exchange. 8 weeks to discover that their own infrastructure is fucked. Now looking at how to invoice them for our time in diagnosing their issues.

More grease Vicar?

BTw is the main problem, a lot of people slated Enta for moving to IPSC/WBC but as I understand it - to some extent they were forced over by a far above inflation hike in BTw IP Stream charges last year. As ever the consumer is bent over By BTw while the ISPs take the heat for BT's abuses of the price structure (and OFCOM look the other way) - especially for those in areas where BT has a monopoly in fixed line broadband. Of course now there are huge problems showing up with WBC as BT have set it up and by the comments on some forums... BTw seem to have their fingers in their ears (or elsewhere) with regard to the problem.

Now with the proposed Broadband tax I am to be screwed even further, as WBC wont hit my exchange till the end of the roll out - BTw are too busy trying to compete in LLU areas to bother with us market 1 guys - So I will be paying this "tax" while being doubly screwed over on a last gen connection with BT's useless profiling system while others who already have faster connections available (often at a lower cost) get the benefit - great idea that man... collect your bonus when you enter private industry!

BTw have proved time and again that they are technically and morally unfit to have control of such a large slice of UK telecoms and internet services. It needs to be hived off to a not for profit organisation. a good start would be to remove the "phone tax", I dont need a "full service" phone line - either technically or personally so why am I forced to have one just to have broadband??

Oh and while we are at it, get rid of OFCOM who seem to exist only to sell off spectrum and nod through any abuse by BT group. There is no protection fro consumers under the current set up, so they are pretty much redundant!