UK ISPs Want iPlayer Toll

Tough luck. Your subscribers pay you to provide a connection at a certain speed. Plenty of ISPs out there can afford to provide service to heavy bandwidth users, you UK ISPs can too.

Here's an idea, if you UK ISPs can't afford to provide service and still make a profit, why don't you get out of the business? Somebody else will pick up the slack.

As previously mentioned Tiscali offer an extremely low price, low quality and shaped to crap service.

These are the guys that restrict people's service for daring to use 350MB in a week between 6pm and midnight.

Same with Carphone Warehouse, offering their service 'free' and shaped to hell, and BT.

All symptomatic of the UK regulator artificially inflating the prices that they pay for wholesale access to the ILEC network to encourage unbundling of COs and promote competition, however even some of those doing that are offering services so cheap that they are shaping to make the numbers work, Carphone being one of them.

Tiscali have unbundled some, but are using it purely to drive costs for themselves down, still shape their customers to crap.

BT are the only ISP that use their interconnect method, and they have a small army of Ellacoyas to control traffic.

As with so many other things you get what you pay for and hopefully this will convince all the people who snubbed paying a few bucks more for a better service of that.

What a line of bullshit if I ever heard one... The internet was setup to move IP packets regardless of content, be it email, web pages, FTP packets, streaming audio or video.

You have to love how ignorant these execs are about the internet despite the fact that they run the companies that provide access to it. No wonder they are coming up with the asinine ideas they have. They haven't a clue.

That was a Tiscali exec for you.

The bandwidth Tiscali have is a pretty long way from unlimited, and their network is set up with a view to doing nothing.

Core network saturation, local VP saturation, national interconnect saturation, extreme shaping. All in a day's work for Tiscali. Go complain about it to their Bangalore customer services and be ignored.

Crap services, crap billing, crap support, crap customer service.

But hey it's really, really cheap. Can't think why.

1) Charge people to connect.
2) Charge providers for connection.
3) Charge providers for the bandwidth they use. (and often the users too)

Now they want to charge providers extra for their expenses of providing the services 1, 2, and 3 that people already pay for! They are like leeches, they want everyone else to pay for everything, but they rake in the profits.

I just don't understand the logic of these thinking.

"You owe us money for us to bill you for service! If you don't pay us to upgrade our infrastructure, we'll cripple you!"

This type of situation only occurs when too much of the infrastructure and the connections are in the hands of a few, far too powerful companies with limited or no competition.

I have always thought that customers should pay for exactly how much they use. Those who download 24/7 from Newsgroups and p2p should end up paying their proportion of the cost instead of moderate users subsidizing them.

Thus if you want to download HD Movies and TV shows....You can as long as you want to bear the costs.

Hob

Just saw a documentary where France is beginning to lay down fibers to provide a Fios like service. And they actually encourage the user to use their service to view multimedia contents.

So it's not an excuse for UK's ISP providers. They'll have to keep up with the times.

Ah, here's our brand new 2007 Corvette... just your style! Only $75,000 w/ a top speed of 250mph, and able to drive practically ANYWHERE... ANYTIME! You're truly unlimited!

SOME RESTRICTIONS APPLY. THE PRICE QUOTED IS FOR THE VEHICLE ITSELF. IF YOU ACTUALLY INTEND TO USE THE VEHICLE, YOU WILL INCUR A ZOOM-ZOOM FEE OF $5.00 PER MILE DRIVEN. TOP SPEED IS ONLY POSTED FOR PERFORMANCE REASONS. ANY SPEED OVER 30MPH WILL RESULT IN A ZOOM-OVERAGE FEE OF AN ADDITIONAL $1.00 PER MPH OVER. THE IN-DASH STEREO SYSTEM CAN PLAY OVER 1000 XM STATIONS; HOWEVER, IF YOU DO NOT CHOOSE ONE OF THE ONLY DOZEN "APPROVED" STATIONS, YOU WILL BE IN BREECH OF YOUR VEHICULAR AGREEMENT, RESULTING IN A COMPLETE BAN FROM YOUR VEHICLE. FOR INTERNAL REASONS, WE CAN NOT ADVISE WHAT THESE STATIONS ARE. THIS NOTICE CAN BE UPDATED AT ANYTIME WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE.

Ultimately, I think this is exactly what will happen. And the heaviest users will have to either be rich or cut back on their consumption of bandwidth.

Here is a better Idea. If you want unrestricted, unfiltered, unshaped, do what you want to with it bandwidth, stop buying residential class services.

When they figure the pricing on these services they don't figure that the end user is going to slam it at 100% 24/7. This is how they bring the price down. If you were to go to a data center and buy 8Mb of service from any vendor you wont get it for the same per/mb you get at home. You won't even come close.

What you may be overlooking is that the internet is a classic example of a business that has very high fixed costs and very low variable costs. Billing by the byte is analogous to billing by the minute for phone calls. It's a business model that is rapidly becoming obsolete.

What ISPs will need to do is come up with a model that looks at total bandwidth used over a period of time (to cover the average size of the pipe they need to contract for) as well as some form of peak time billing to cover the margins.

Yeah, idiots -- but not the ISPs.

"And here you were thinking it was the network operator's job to fund capacity upgrades in order to meet consumer demand...."

Well, it's NOT. If they don't want to upgrade to meet "consumer demands", that's their business. Take it or leave it.

This post is destined to be a classic. I can see it flying from mailbox to mailbox already.

The issue boils down to a lack of capacity. The problem is that content providers have gone with a 1:1 service through ip rather than a 1:many service using multicast. If content providers and network managers actually thought about the problem they could come up with a manageable solution.

Network operators are just trying to extort money rather than address the problems in a sensible manner.

Leave it. You know there's going to be some ISP who will be willing to put up with all this bandwidth use and that will happily absorb all the people leaving the ISPs that try to hinder what the user wants to do.

Wow, I almost shot soda out of my nose at that one... and I wasn't even drinking soda!

True... sad that it is true, too. Looks like the Comcast ToS!

quote:

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The issue boils down to a lack of capacity. The problem is that content providers have gone with a 1:1 service through ip rather than a 1:many service using multicast. If content providers and network managers actually thought about the problem they could come up with a manageable solution.

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I agree that multicasting can solve problems, but in this particular case:

quote:

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that lets broadband users watch content from the last 7 days of BBC broadcasting

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It sounds like the service is a video on demand type service that multicast wouldn't help with.

That's fine, as long as ISP's are aware that the average usage for all users will keep rising, and structure any over usage fees/penalties up front. If they can't or choose not to keep up with bandwidth demands, they'll find themselves nailing an ever greater percentage of users with usage fees, ultimately pricing themselves out of the market.

The AVERAGE Usage is no where near what the members of this site feel it is. Its the posters that continually brag about what they download in a month that need to bring down their usage or pony up and pay for it and the network upgrades only they are demanding.

Hob

If only there was some kind of invention that could alleviate the impact...

...some kind of, erm, "thingy," that could -- you know -- cache data that was repetitively accessed...

yeah, one of those cache thingies...

Watch ISP's will try to force charging money per e-mail you get and send. lmao

Explain...

because I don't see very many people using Dial up where broadband is offered. People are sharing lots of video and music now more so then ever. How is the average usage no where near what many of us here at BBR speak of?

Because 90% of users don't download music and videos - either free ones or for pay ones.

Virgin cable upgraded their max speed to 20Mb, and then restricted usage between 4pm-12am. I am on 2Mb (£17.99) and if I download 350Mb between those times my connection goes to crap. It should be 1Mb/128k (throttled) but the lag on it is awful.

Multicasting would only solve the problem in the case of LIVE broadcasting.

What is actually needed here is something like Akamai, where the content is cached on the provider's local networks and it reduces the overall transport bandwidth needed.

Pay per usage is already in place...

When you purchase an X Mbps pipe from a provider, you are paying for the ability to download up to the X gigabytes that the pipe can provide. If you want to go over the X gigabytes that you pipe at X Mbps can provide, you need to pay for a pipe at Y Mbps.

Because the average user uses his broadband to surf quicker.
Just because you are sharing music and video, the average user is not....He may look at a few youtube vids....but its no where near the 100's of Gigs that the few download.

Lots of people have lives!

Hob

Yeah, I wish someone would invent a cache thingie...

Invest in the infrastructure, not in the beach house.

Exactly the ass backwards thinking of the rich.