Traffic Shaping Round 2 - The BBC iPlayer

First the WoW Players are ‘heavy usage’ customers. . .and now using Online Video will make you a ‘heavy usage’ user.

A couple of days ago a thread was started on the World of Warcraft servers. Players from mainly the NYC area(but other places as well) have been complaining about service issues with not only WoW but many other online games. From high ping times to choppy gameplay, check out this article for more details.

There is a widely popular Internet TV gaining lots of momentum called BBC iPlayer. This new start-up allows visitors to watch the last 7 days of BBC TV programming, right on your computer. It seems Tiscali, BT, and Carphone Warehouse. Here is a direct quote, in response to this issue, from the CEO of Tiscali

“The Internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite. If the iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the Internet will get very slow service and call their ISPs to complain.”

Now, Tiscali claims that if the BBC helps pay for more network upgrades and to help purchase the extra bandwidth, Traffic Throttling would not be needed. So far the BBC has done nothing to improve these efforts.

In your opinion, should the content creators have to pay ‘their share’ of usage on the internet? Is that not one of the things an ISP agrees to when they get into the business. That’s like a Dog Catcher saying he won’t pursue that dog because he is afraid. It’s your job to provide the service. . .if not, admit you can’t do it and someone else will pick up where you left off. If there is money to be made. . .and a service that has a demand, someone will be there to provide it.

What I would like to see is a multi-package ISP and in the end I believe this will work best when multiple companies begin to compete to be your internet provider. Have a tier for dial-up speeds, one for DSL speeds, and then ones for maybe 5Mbit - 10Mbit - 20Mbit. Of course there will also be Bandwidth limits on these levels/tiers.

With multiple companies offering multiple plans like this, I think competition will be great, and the REAL price of bandwidth will emerge. At this moment I feel that in the US ISPs over charge it’s customers for what they use. Yes we like our websites to load quickly, but do we really need to be charged 50 dollars a month and have that much of an unused connection.

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