BBC iPlayer gets people interested, but are the ISPs up to the job?
I have just been reading the BBC's post about the success of the iPlayer since its official Christmas launch. Although, whilst I am extremely happy for their success, I fear that there is little room for growth, in fact after a couple of months there may even be a slow down in usage, especially with streaming programmes, as the ISPs start to throttle people's internet.
As a user who has been using the iPlayer for months, my broadband seems to be constantly throttled these days. It got to the point the other night that I was downloading a file at an extremely feeble 6k rather than the supposed 2Mb (unlimited) I am subscribed to! The fair use limits can not be considered fair use in any true sense of the word, as they have failed to respond to changing habits in internet use. Although in truth I can't say that they are "unfair" as it is extremely hard to find out exactly what they are, and you are given no warning the throttling is coming.
Whilst we have been hearing a lot about the government's concern with broadband speeds not living up to the advertised speeds, they really need to be stepping in and knocking some ISP heads together. Leave it to the market when it works, but the ISP market is not working.
Whilst it will probably all be sorted at some vague point in the future, it really doesn't help with the missed episode of Kingdom that is currently only available in a streaming format on ITV.com (although ITV.com have noticeable improved the finding of programmes I can no-longer stream).
1 Comments:
You've no clue. 2mbit of unmetered bandwidth costs around £200 a month to ISPs. Therefore it is clear that ISPs will never be able to offer you true unlimited, without charging you vast amounts of money. They are only able to offer the bandwidth on a fair usage basis because most people aren't using the bandwidth all the time. That is the reality, you share your bandwidth with others, and I think you'll find your ADSL link has a 50:1 contention ratio. This means then, that of your 2mbit, you're actually only *entitled* to just 40kbit.
The problem for ISPs is that usage has shifted from web browsing (that has plenty of natural pauses where you aren't downloading anything), to streaming video or large downloads which use up large, constant amounts of bandwidth. Many of those downloads in the peer to peer arena being illegal.
All you might achieve by banging heads together is forcing caps on all services because ISPs will get rapped for using the "unlimited" term. Which they should, because it's a bunch of idiot people in marketing who promised to deliver something the infrastructure isn't able to. Caps then, heavy traffic shaping, or higher prices all round, will be the end result.
Oh, and you signed a contract with your ISP. If you aren't happy with it, go and get another contract from another ISP.
24 February 2008 at 17:00
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