[IP] Re: BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: David P. Reed [dpreed@reed.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 9:37 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet

Is it a silly idea to suggest that if users increase their usage such
that ISPs incur larger costs, perhaps ISPs should raise their prices
*and* reinvest in capital infrastructure?

A CEO of a company that sets its own pricing should probably not be
whining when all its competitors share the exact same cost increases,
*and* those increases are predicted in the industry widely.

CEOs who fail to anticipate cost increases well documented in the
marketplace are usually fired when their competitors eat their market
share as their service degrades.

Is it the government who is supposed to fix a CEO's failure to think?

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 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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