Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:12:16 -0700
________________________________________ From: Tony Lauck [tlauck () madriver com] Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 9:45 AM To: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet There is nothing unreasonable about users using the Internet to exchange information. That's what it's for! ISPs should be delighted that traffic is increasing, otherwise their revenues would be riding Moore's law down to zero. I am sick of hearing providers gripe about customers. Their problem isn't with customers, it is with government in the form of unreasonable regulations that support unreasonable monopolies. David Farber wrote:
________________________________________ From: Brett Glass [brett () lariat net] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 8:46 PM To: David Farber; ip Subject: Re: [IP] BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internetThe success of the BBC's iPlayer is putting the internet under severe strain and threatening to bring the network to a halt, internet service providers claimed yesterday.Actually, the network is not being overloaded. What is happening is that the ISPs are incurring huge, unsustainable bandwidth charges. To understand why, you have to know how third party ISPs in the UK operate. They buy wholesale upstream (backbone) bandwidth for their connections to the Internet, and then wholesale downstream bandwidth on the DSL system. So, they're charged twice for every byte they transit from the BBC to their users. Which works so long as users keep to a reasonable duty cycle. But iPlayer feeds users such a volume of material -- all of it free of cost because BBC programming is paid for by TV user fees -- that they are losing money on their flat rate residential accounts. It's not as bad as the situation with P2P, where the ISP pays MULTIPLE times for every byte the user downloads because the user's machine -- acting as a server -- uploads it many times more. But it's still economically unsustainable. If the ISPs are to stay in business, they need to cover their costs. Should the money come from a share of the BBC's TV "taxes" (which every TV owner in the UK pays)? Or directly from the users in the form of higher bandwidth fees or overage charges? Or from the backbone providers or local loop providers in forced cost reductions to the ISPs? It seems as if it will have to be one of the above, because the bandwidth charges are breaking the bank. And the ISPs, caught in the middle as they so often are, do need to find a way to stay solvent. After all, they are doing useful work and deserve to be paid for it. --Brett Glass
------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet David Farber (Apr 09)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet David Farber (Apr 10)
- Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet David Farber (Apr 10)
- Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet David Farber (Apr 10)
- Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet David Farber (Apr 10)
- Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet David Farber (Apr 10)
- Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet David Farber (Apr 10)