The iPlayer and the bandwidth timebomb


The battle royale has begun in earnest between the big content providers and the Internet Service Providers.

Whilst the ISPs have been under great pressure to punish people for illegal music downloads (or is it uploads… it’s still unclear), they have been happy to blame UK bandwidth problems on suppliers (or is it users?) of bandwidth-heavy services like BBCs iPlayer and Channel 4′s 4OD.

But the BBC’s Ashley Highfield, head of future media and technology, claimed last week that ISPs should get themselves in order, saying “unlimited broadband” should mean just that, not “slowed down when you approach a limit” and that the use of “up to” should be banned in ads. He also offered to name and shame ISPs that tried to charge content providers. “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.”

Read more:

The bandwidth timebomb! | Community Site News

Why ISPs are hopping mad about the iPlayer | Guardian

  • http://www.reversedelta.com Dave Bancroft

    I’m in about 3 minds about this topic! On the one hand, the UK Government (who lest us forget are indirectly the BBC’s main funders) stand to gain a windfall by selling off another bunch of radio spectrum when they move us all from terrestrial TV to digital “freeview” (which will not of course be “free” once everyone has upgraded their TV’s, VCR’s, aerials etc). I was initially against this idea as I think TV works really well as it is, and we could really use the bandwidth more wisely. Until I appreciated the fact that freeing up these frequencies will enable wide area Wi-fi — allowing broadband speed connections to even the most remote of areas, without cabling. This will be a revolution for the information age.

    However, my other bone of contention is BT’s monopolistic grip on our inter-network and Ofcom’s slowness to force them to release their grip. If we had laid fibre years ago, we too could be experiencing the kind of download speeds those in South Korea have had for years: almost 5 times what we have.

    As most of the ISP’s are beholden to BT (and in one case Plus.net — one of the complainants — are actually owned by BT) I’m a bit confused as to who to blame for the mess that I am sure we will find ourselves in. For BT to hold us back and then complain about lack of bandwidth (albeit via one of their subsidiaries) is a bit rich!

    If the Government had pressed Ofcom to encourage BT to lay down a high speed network, then the BBC using it to pipe high quality TV to us, and freeing up spectrum for wide area Wi-fi would leave us with the best of both worlds.

    As the situation stands, I can only see the Goverment gaining cash from the next big sale, and BT saving cash at the expense of the smaller ISPs who are seeing their margins shrivel in the face of stiff competition.

This entry was posted by Dave Haygarth in Internet trends, Web news.