BBC tells ISPs to get stuffed

chris

Relationships between the BBC and internet industry have plunged to an all-time low, after the BBC's internet chief Ashley Highfield used a blog post yesterday to tell ISPs to get stuffed - and even threatened to name and shame them.

The cost of carrying iPlayer traffic has been a sore point for ISPs, who must absorb steeply rising traffic costs. Regulator OFCOM's Market Impact Assessment estimated the P2P version of iPlayer would create up to £831m in extra costs for the internet industry. In the first month of the "low bandwidth" iPlayer, ISPs saw streaming costs rise 20 per cent.

But Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the £4bn-a-year corporation, said the BBC won't help them out.

"I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers," he scolds.

"They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want. If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and what content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy."

Highfield instead advises them to pass the increased costs onto their customers in the form of tiers of service (ie price increases).

And if ISPs didn't follow his "advice", and dared to traffic shape their networks to manage their bandwidth hogs, Highfield threatened that the BBC would name and shame them.

"Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content worked best on (and which to avoid). I hope it doesn’t come to this, as I think we (the BBC and the ISPs) are currently working better together than ever."

Being put on the BBC's List of Shame could have serious commercial repercussions for internet providers.

(Highfield also raised eyebrows with his assertion that "The best technical solution is usually Moore’s law". An oddly ignorant thing to say, since the capacity and price of copper and fibre connections have very little to do with the density of transistors on a semiconductor die. Earth to Ashley: Ceci n'est pas une pipe.)

It's a lose-lose situation for the ISPs. If they refuse to carry iPlayer material, they lose customers and go out of business. If they do carry iPlayer material, and traffic shape their networks, the BBC will shame them, and they go out of business. Who'd be an ISP?

Highfield's heavy-handed intervention may undo much of the conciliatory work undertaken by iPlayer boss Anthony Rose. As we reported recently, the BBC is exploring building its own Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ease the delivery costs for ISPs.

One executive at a major ISP stormed back at Highfield:

"Relying on the customer's failure to read the small print is not the basis for a digital content strategy."


Source: theregister

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Topper

I say go for it name and shame, It would not surprise me if they are already using bandwidth shaping to divert you away from certain content already. That would certainly explain why I constantly get server not found when posting on this forum.


Charming indeed

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Formerly toppervte33h
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rolfw

Same here with Youtube, I am finding it almost impossible now to receive a steady stream from them.

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easysat

I wouldn't have thought reading text on this forum generates a lot of bandwidth for your ISP. Maybe it's a DNS problem. What happens if you click "reload page" on your browser? If it is this, you could try manually setting your preferred DNS in the network settings to another ISP's DNS address.

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pc::

Topper

If I wasn't bothered about getting my mail perhaps but piggybacking is not the solution to the problem in any case modern mail servers restrict you from doing that now, they prefer to identify you before allowing you to access their mail servers.

It is definitely not a DNS problem
People do not just read on here, they are searching, downloading, uploading. Reload page does nothing apart from give the same message There is a bandwidth constriction before the signal leaves the country to go transatlantic to the server. I have traced it on a number of occasions and it is 10 hops before I reach that point, and it can go no further, I have taken this up with my ISP a number of times and amazingly they can correct it at the click of a mouse when I do complain. But why should I have to ring up and complain all the time. It is purely a shaping or contention problem and whilst the rest of the world is set to have download speeds of minimum 10 Meg/s by 2012 we will still be hickupping our way at 2Mb/s or less

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War does not determine who is right, it determines who is left!

Formerly toppervte33h
whose six pack has turned into a keg

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