Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
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 internet

> The 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


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