Posts by Joe

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

It's Joe again

I think that youtube and the like are VERY different from iPlayer.

Look at the quality!!!! Damn image is smaller than a box of matches for crying out loud!! Plus youtube videos are short, in-between them you're not using much bandwidth. If you watch Lost on iPlayer you're using the line to full capacity for a good 40 minutes.

Upgrading the network is mind-blowingly expensive, if ISPs pay for it all (which they hardly can, seeing the competition and the limited margins in this sector) you'd need to multiply your broadband package price 3-4-5 fold. Now I owuldn't be happy about that!

""The Beebs' iPlayer service clearly doesn't fit the network, which wasn't designed to cope with that sort of traffic"

Very, very little of what we do now fits into the category of what the Internet was designed to cope with..."

True, but iPlayer doesn't fit the network by a considerable margin. If Youtube vids were of the same quality a iPlayer, you can bet Google would have had a knock on the door long ago.

It's true that the obvious solution is to up the price ocnsumers pay, but if that cost could be spread around to those who contricbute to the NEED of a better network, weel I think it would be fair.

I, for instance, don't really have the cash for a £50/month line, which is what we would be expected to pay, if ISPs upgraded the network without any help.

When internet first came around, my service provider was Deamon (cool name :-)

Well, they couldn't hope of forking out the necessary cash to lay down phone lines: they hired them from BT for a small fee. Today, how can ISPs hope to have the necessary cash to lay down optic-fiber???

It could seem fair that they do it, but I just don't think it's economically possible, just as BMW and Mercedes are not expected to pay for building roads :-)

Against all odds:

I'm actually with Tiscali on this one.

It happens that I have a tiscali broadband package, which by-the-way works fine most of the time, and even exceeds the maximum speed (280kB/s on a 2Mb line)

Now they say they offer unlimited broadband and all, with only a limit on bandwidth between 6 and 11 pm. That doesn't mean you can't use the internet, it simply means that you shouldn't use bandwidth-hungry applications, like P2P, iPlayer and so on. It's a bitch alright, but it allows everybody to experience a decent line speed in the evening, when everybody's on the internet. In France they don't usually have these requirements, and I can tell you it's a pain in the arse when there's a P2P maniac between you and the exchange. My 512 kb/s line gave me a 8kB/s trickle at the best of time (yes, it was a few years ago, but still)

Now the Beebs comes in and expects ISPs to do whatever is necessary to allow iPlayer traffic to go through without a glitch. But dude, increasing a network's capabilty is fucking expensive!! You can't expect to pay so little for your broadband package, and get lightning speed DLs with a huge bandwidth! The price we pay for broadband is in adequation with the bandwidth capabilities of the line. Then somebody walks in and expect the available bandwidth to double, well who's gonna pay for that?? I personnaly don't use iPlayer, and I would be really pissed if my package doubled in price just 'cause the BBC wants to flood the network.

And charging only those who use iPlayer wouldn't work, they wouldn't want to pay 3 times what others pay, and with a hike of only a few punds, well it wouldn't bring in enough cash.

I understand that other applications are bandwidth-hungry, but not on the same level as iPlayer. Come on, when you think about it, soon everybody will be able to watch TV, anytime, using the internet. You can't expect the current network to cope with that, and it's not fair to expect ISPs to foot the whole bill.

If a car manufacturer came in tomorrow with a car that's 6 meters wide, would you expect the coucil (and therefore the tax-payer) to widen all the roads in the country to fit that car? Hardly. Yet your right to use the roads is "unlimited"... within reasonable limits, like "you car must fit the road in the first place".

The Beebs' iPlayer service clearly doesn't fit the network, which wasn't designed to cope with that sort of traffic. Seeing how much it costs to upgrade the network, I think it's fair that everybody pitches in, not just the ISPs who seem to be under the obligation to offer lightning-fast line speeds, unlimited bandwidth, at rock-bottom prices...

In France (I'm French) they are upgrading the network to optic-fiber. Costs them billions!!!! But the government is helping them, otherwise there's no chance it could be done. The result in pretty impressive: 60mb/s for something like £20/month.

But everybody pitched in, and no-one expected the IPSs to do everything themselves.

5 years ago, in Paris, I paid less for a 20mb line than I pay NOW in UK for a 2mb line... If we expect ISPs to upgrade the network to optic-fiber without any help, I dare not imagine what we're gonna pay for broadband then...