re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet TrialHas anybody measured the actual bandwidth rates of the average household? Are the folks breaking the caps infringing on intellectual property rights? If so, isn't TWC effectively stealing revenue that isn't theirs to begin with? I'm all for metered internet if it drives investment and upgrades of the infrastructure bottlenecks but I'm not sure profiteering based on piracy will work in the long run. It may set up TWC for some massive infighting with copyright holders.
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet TrialThey'll end up with customers complaining, probably on trashy tabloid current affairs shows, about going over quota and getting huge bills (there has been examples of $8000 and even $28000 IIRC). What will most likely then happen is traffic rate limiting ("shaping") after you hit your quota, down to a speed like 64Kbps, resulting in a fixed bill each month.
This is how the Australian DSL market works, and has worked for around the last 4 to 5 years.
The issue of retransmissions / advertisements etc. chewing up customers quotas hasn't been enough of an issue (to anyone, even those of us who understand the issue) to have ever been a negative issue for the industry.
The following website provides details of the various plans and options available here in .au:
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet TrialComrades, Like Australia, weGÇÖve had this sort of bandwidth capping over here in the UK for several years now, so I thought IGÇÖd share some experience, as well as some of the issues this raises with end users. Remember that the UK is much more competitive than the US in this respect. 30% of our telephone exchanges (local offices??) are unbundled. I have a choice of several dozen ISPs for residential service (although they will all be carried over BT Wholesale ultimately because my exchange is not unbundled). I gather this isnGÇÖt the typical situation in the US, where there tends to be less choice.
Q: How much of oneGÇÖs allowance do legitimate applications consume?/u> In the past the answer was GÇ£not muchGÇ¥. OldPOTS mentioned adverts, which are clearly not solicited by the users. I suspect youGÇÖll find that even these only scratch the surface of a typical B/W cap. If IGÇÖm browsing the web, sending email GÇô even working from home, and I have a clean PC, itGÇÖs unlikely IGÇÖll hit my cap (15GBytes per month).
Q: So what does use up the allowance?/u> In the UK caps were introduced to deter the P2P file sharers GÇô who (at that time) typically represented less than 5% of the customer base. LetGÇÖs be honest GÇô historically most P2P involves illegal (ie. copyright infringing) content. This is mostly still true today. I could burn through my monthly allowance in about 2 days if I turn on uncontrolled P2P. Downloading just the latest series of Boston Legal would pretty much do it. But this is breaking the law, and so the UK ISPs have always had a moral argument in addition to the GÇ£weGÇÖre protecting the majority of our users and ensuring they have good serviceGÇ¥ argument. But since January 08 the BBC has been offering GÇ£catch up TVGÇ¥ using its iPlayer service, and UK ISPs are seeing an increasing % of their customers moving into the GÇ£heavy userGÇ¥ category. This use of the Internet is perfectly legal. And weGÇÖre not talking about rubbish content that strewn with commercials here GÇô this is BBC content (the Gold Standard), and no commercials at all. Cripes, no wonder itGÇÖs popular (over 2 million regular users now).
Q: Does botnet traffic chew up my allowance?/u> Possibly. The technology to detect infected users has existed for several years. In fact the Ellacoya and Sandvine boxes that the ISPs use for traffic measurement can also be used to detect infected users because they send a lot of spam (spam is still the most profitable way for the botnet controller to use the zombie PCs under his control). IGÇÖve spoken to many UK and US ISPs in the past and they have a gut feel that between 25% and 33% of their users are infected in this way. But the problem is that thereGÇÖs little incentive for them to spend the time to decontaminate those users.
I suspect the people reading this site are significantly less likely to have an infected PC. But in the general population, infection is extremely common.
And botnet traffic will generally speed up and slow down to GÇ£fillGÇ¥ the available pipe. So yes, it could easily trigger these cap restrictions. WhoGÇÖs to blame? The GÇ£lawGÇ¥ (such as it is) says that the user is. They are the ones responsible for keeping their PC clean. Mere conduit implies that the ISP is not responsible.
Q: Are these US caps too small?/u> TWCGÇÖs cap numbers are at the high end of the typical UK allowance. Most UK ISPs over here will start to throttle GÇ£unlimitedGÇ¥ services after 10-20 GBytes of peak time download in a monthly measurement period. My ISP has a pretty sophisticated throttling approach where P2P traffic is throttled back but interactive traffic is not.
An interesting statistic would be to know what % of a typical ISPGÇÖs users are being throttled in a typical month. Again, we hear this GÇ£5%GÇ¥ number bandied about a lot, but I donGÇÖt have access to that data.
IMHO I think TWC is taking the right approach by offering a "small" (compared to the other US ISPs mentioned) cap to start with. After 6 months of real life service, maybe theyGÇÖll send a nice letter to their customers telling them theyGÇÖre increasing the cap. ItGÇÖs a lot easier to adjust caps upwards than downwards!
Q: Will these caps achieve their objective?/u> Good question (glad I asked :-) ). On the one hand you can say GÇ£yesGÇ¥, because hard core P2P sharers - this apocryphal "5%" - tend to move to ISPs that are not capping, or have published higher caps. So if these users genuinely represent a tiny minority then caps have done the job and got them off GÇ£my networkGÇ¥.
But if applications like iPlayer are converting light users into heavy users then the model starts to break.
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet Trialoops - let me re-format that :-)
Comrades, Like Australia, weGÇÖve had this sort of bandwidth capping over here in the UK for several years now, so I thought IGÇÖd share some experience, as well as some of the issues this raises with end users. Remember that the UK is much more competitive than the US in this respect. 30% of our telephone exchanges (local offices??) are unbundled. I have a choice of several dozen ISPs for residential service (although they will all be carried over BT Wholesale ultimately because my exchange is not unbundled). I gather this isnGÇÖt the typical situation in the US, where there tends to be less choice.
Q: How much of oneGÇÖs allowance do legitimate applications consume? In the past the answer was GÇ£not muchGÇ¥. OldPOTS mentioned adverts, which are clearly not solicited by the users. I suspect youGÇÖll find that even these only scratch the surface of a typical B/W cap. If IGÇÖm browsing the web, sending email GÇô even working from home, and I have a clean PC, itGÇÖs unlikely IGÇÖll hit my cap (15GBytes per month).
Q: So what does use up the allowance? In the UK caps were introduced to deter the P2P file sharers GÇô who (at that time) typically represented less than 5% of the customer base. LetGÇÖs be honest GÇô historically most P2P involves illegal (ie. copyright infringing) content. This is mostly still true today. I could burn through my monthly allowance in about 2 days if I turn on uncontrolled P2P. Downloading just the latest series of Boston Legal would pretty much do it. But this is breaking the law, and so the UK ISPs have always had a moral argument in addition to the GÇ£weGÇÖre protecting the majority of our users and ensuring they have good serviceGÇ¥ argument. But since January 08 the BBC has been offering GÇ£catch up TVGÇ¥ using its iPlayer service, and UK ISPs are seeing an increasing % of their customers moving into the GÇ£heavy userGÇ¥ category. This use of the Internet is perfectly legal. And weGÇÖre not talking about rubbish content that strewn with commercials here GÇô this is BBC content (the Gold Standard), and no commercials at all. Cripes, no wonder itGÇÖs popular (over 2 million regular users now).
Q: Does botnet traffic chew up my allowance? Possibly. The technology to detect infected users has existed for several years. In fact the Ellacoya and Sandvine boxes that the ISPs use for traffic measurement can also be used to detect infected users because they send a lot of spam (spam is still the most profitable way for the botnet controller to use the zombie PCs under his control). IGÇÖve spoken to many UK and US ISPs in the past and they have a gut feel that between 25% and 33% of their users are infected in this way. But the problem is that thereGÇÖs little incentive for them to spend the time to decontaminate those users.
I suspect the people reading this site are significantly less likely to have an infected PC. But in the general population, infection is extremely common.
And botnet traffic will generally speed up and slow down to GÇ£fillGÇ¥ the available pipe. So yes, it could easily trigger these cap restrictions. WhoGÇÖs to blame? The GÇ£lawGÇ¥ (such as it is) says that the user is. They are the ones responsible for keeping their PC clean. Mere conduit implies that the ISP is not responsible.
Q: Are these US caps too small? TWCGÇÖs cap numbers are at the high end of the typical UK allowance. Most UK ISPs over here will start to throttle GÇ£unlimitedGÇ¥ services after 10-20 GBytes of peak time download in a monthly measurement period. My ISP has a pretty sophisticated throttling approach where P2P traffic is throttled back but interactive traffic is not.
An interesting statistic would be to know what % of a typical ISPGÇÖs users are being throttled in a typical month. Again, we hear this GÇ£5%GÇ¥ number bandied about a lot, but I donGÇÖt have access to that data.
IMHO I think TWC is taking the right approach by offering a "small" (compared to the other US ISPs mentioned) cap to start with. After 6 months of real life service, maybe theyGÇÖll send a nice letter to their customers telling them theyGÇÖre increasing the cap. ItGÇÖs a lot easier to adjust caps upwards than downwards!
Q: Will these caps achieve their objective? Good question (glad I asked :-) ). On the one hand you can say GÇ£yesGÇ¥, because hard core P2P sharers - this apocryphal "5%" - tend to move to ISPs that are not capping, or have published higher caps. So if these users genuinely represent a tiny minority then caps have done the job and got them off GÇ£my networkGÇ¥.
But if applications like iPlayer are converting light users into heavy users then the model starts to break.
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet TrialHi rj, This is a very interesting point.
My gut feel is that, without video of some kind, it's hard to break the typical cap limit.
So what kinds of "legal" video are there?
Well, YouTube of course. But these are usually pretty short videos, of relatively low quality (300kbps).
Then there are retail video services, like iTunes (which has only this week extended its video offering over here to the UK). The prices for UK iTunes video are ludicrously high - it's about the same price to go an buy the DVD in most cases. But I'm sure we'll see an adoption of this service.
Then there's BBC iPlayer, which I mentioned in my post. This is free, legal, does not have commercials, and is premium content. So it's very, very popular.
BUT - before iPlayer I suspect the most common form of video (and therefore of bandwidth consumption) was P2P illegal file sharing.
To answer your question though - at least in the UK the ISP is protected by "mere conduit"? UK ISPs are desperately avoiding a test case for mere conduit, but I think it still applies here. I've been told by an EU official that in many European countries mere conduit is already dead.
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet TrialHi rj, Yes indeed.
In the UK there's a vague assumption on the contention ratio in the backhaul connection from the local office. Historically it was always quoted as 20:1 for business services and 50:1 for residential services. But ISPs are not required to publish their actual contention rates per exchange, so it's anybody's guess what the actual numbers are. Needless to say, the more users that an ISP can cram onto a given amount of backhaul capacity, the better their economics.
But the downside of higher contention rates is that GÇ£demandingGÇ¥ applications will start to suffer. HereGÇÖs an example from my own experience. If I look at an iPlayer streamed TV program during the working day (letGÇÖs assume IGÇÖm taking a well-deserved coffee break shall we?), then the 512kbps video stream runs perfectly.
However, in the evenings I often find that the iPlayer video will freeze, and will try to buffer the video stream. The same thing is true for YouTube videos.
So, given it works in the day I assume my local loop (which runs at 2Mbps) is not the bottleneck. ItGÇÖs probably the fact that in the evening all of my pesky neighbours are using their broadband connections and the backhaul is overloaded.
I assume that the high contention rates I quoted above are based on early broadband experience, that predates the wide use of video streaming. So thatGÇÖs what I meant by GÇ£light usersGÇ¥. The ISP has dimensioned the backhaul (and thereby their business model) on the basis of low demand applications.
But the iPlayer, which is a high demand (well, I suppose 512kbps is sort of high) application thatGÇÖs perfectly legal, and extremely popular. So itGÇÖs transforming a large fraction of the ISPGÇÖs customer base from GÇ£lightGÇ¥ to GÇ£heavyGÇ¥ users, and thatGÇÖs what is hitting the business model.
You raise an excellent point about ISPs tracking technology advances, but the fact is that the backhaul is the least GÇ£unbundledGÇ¥ part of the UK broadband network. Given there are over 5500 exchanges in the UK itGÇÖs going to be interesting to see how we (the UK) can support a large scale upgrade. 21CN should help a bit, but itGÇÖs late arriving unfortunately.
As you say, where colo is possible economically, then the problem is easier to solve because there is likely to be a high density of users in that area. Out of the 5500 or so UK exchanges, the usual figure for high density locations is 800. This is the number often quoted for LLU candidates, but it's logical to assume they're good candidates for competitive backhaul too.
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet Trialre: "But if applications like iPlayer are converting light users into heavy users then the model starts to break."
Geoff, nice post. Can you elaborate on what you meant by the above?
I'm thinking the model should support increased demand by increasing supply while reducing prices, matching technological advancements. We've seen this in consumer purchased technologies for decades now. In the US we see this happening at internet colos. Prices stay flat or decrease while per unit technology delivered increases.
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet Trial One comment.
I believe in that rj is implying that UGC has not taken over professional content because of the issues in the network.
This is not correct. UGC is 99% awful, much worse than the worst thing done professionally. Take a look at this year's multiple award winner for a serial....
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet Trialre: "What's the situation in the US?"
I'm not sure if I'm answering your question and fgoldstein knows the policy, regulatory, and legal issues better than me but here is what I understand.
In the US, the ISPs are somewhat insulated from legal liabilities associated with copyright violations. Business wise it's a different story. The media companies hold the cards with respect to high value content. The history of mass media is one where the distributors (RF, cable, microwave, etc.) have the weaker position. The few conglomerate media companies have controlled policy as well as the purse strings. To a limited extent user generated content and piracy is eroding this control. But user generated content is fundamentally dependent upon common carriage regulation which is eroding due to a belief in facilities based competition. The net long term probable outcome is that application independent networks to consumers will suffer from lack of investment while the media companies will fight to maintain their intellectual property rights which drive their revenues. TWC is owned by a media company so them creating revenue from the piracy may be preferred over the theft with no revenues. If these revenues are large enough than the free rider problem shifts to content production and we end up with US quality programming which is much, much worse than that produced by the BBC.
re: TWC Tees Up Metered Internet TrialThe DoD helped Raytheon unload a bunch of debt on Washington Group. The deal was done in such a way that the bankruptcy judge (essentially another insider) would look the other way at the fraud. Washington Group insiders were likely paid off so they would go along with the deal. Washington group shareholders, many held the stock for 30 years or more, lost everything.
It was politics mixed with greed mixed with corruption which has never seen the light of day. It's demonstrates how Wall Street really works much of the time in my opinion. Crooks everywhere where honest work is rarely accomplished and rarely rewarded. Not much different than the guilded age.
This is how the Australian DSL market works, and has worked for around the last 4 to 5 years.
The issue of retransmissions / advertisements etc. chewing up customers quotas hasn't been enough of an issue (to anyone, even those of us who understand the issue) to have ever been a negative issue for the industry.
The following website provides details of the various plans and options available here in .au:
http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/
Like Australia, weGÇÖve had this sort of bandwidth capping over here in the UK for several years now, so I thought IGÇÖd share some experience, as well as some of the issues this raises with end users.
Remember that the UK is much more competitive than the US in this respect. 30% of our telephone exchanges (local offices??) are unbundled. I have a choice of several dozen ISPs for residential service (although they will all be carried over BT Wholesale ultimately because my exchange is not unbundled).
I gather this isnGÇÖt the typical situation in the US, where there tends to be less choice.
Q: How much of oneGÇÖs allowance do legitimate applications consume?/u>
In the past the answer was GÇ£not muchGÇ¥. OldPOTS mentioned adverts, which are clearly not solicited by the users. I suspect youGÇÖll find that even these only scratch the surface of a typical B/W cap. If IGÇÖm browsing the web, sending email GÇô even working from home, and I have a clean PC, itGÇÖs unlikely IGÇÖll hit my cap (15GBytes per month).
Q: So what does use up the allowance?/u>
In the UK caps were introduced to deter the P2P file sharers GÇô who (at that time) typically represented less than 5% of the customer base. LetGÇÖs be honest GÇô historically most P2P involves illegal (ie. copyright infringing) content. This is mostly still true today. I could burn through my monthly allowance in about 2 days if I turn on uncontrolled P2P. Downloading just the latest series of Boston Legal would pretty much do it. But this is breaking the law, and so the UK ISPs have always had a moral argument in addition to the GÇ£weGÇÖre protecting the majority of our users and ensuring they have good serviceGÇ¥ argument.
But since January 08 the BBC has been offering GÇ£catch up TVGÇ¥ using its iPlayer service, and UK ISPs are seeing an increasing % of their customers moving into the GÇ£heavy userGÇ¥ category. This use of the Internet is perfectly legal. And weGÇÖre not talking about rubbish content that strewn with commercials here GÇô this is BBC content (the Gold Standard), and no commercials at all. Cripes, no wonder itGÇÖs popular (over 2 million regular users now).
Q: Does botnet traffic chew up my allowance?/u>
Possibly. The technology to detect infected users has existed for several years. In fact the Ellacoya and Sandvine boxes that the ISPs use for traffic measurement can also be used to detect infected users because they send a lot of spam (spam is still the most profitable way for the botnet controller to use the zombie PCs under his control). IGÇÖve spoken to many UK and US ISPs in the past and they have a gut feel that between 25% and 33% of their users are infected in this way. But the problem is that thereGÇÖs little incentive for them to spend the time to decontaminate those users.
I suspect the people reading this site are significantly less likely to have an infected PC. But in the general population, infection is extremely common.
And botnet traffic will generally speed up and slow down to GÇ£fillGÇ¥ the available pipe. So yes, it could easily trigger these cap restrictions. WhoGÇÖs to blame? The GÇ£lawGÇ¥ (such as it is) says that the user is. They are the ones responsible for keeping their PC clean. Mere conduit implies that the ISP is not responsible.
Q: Are these US caps too small?/u>
TWCGÇÖs cap numbers are at the high end of the typical UK allowance. Most UK ISPs over here will start to throttle GÇ£unlimitedGÇ¥ services after 10-20 GBytes of peak time download in a monthly measurement period. My ISP has a pretty sophisticated throttling approach where P2P traffic is throttled back but interactive traffic is not.
An interesting statistic would be to know what % of a typical ISPGÇÖs users are being throttled in a typical month. Again, we hear this GÇ£5%GÇ¥ number bandied about a lot, but I donGÇÖt have access to that data.
IMHO I think TWC is taking the right approach by offering a "small" (compared to the other US ISPs mentioned) cap to start with. After 6 months of real life service, maybe theyGÇÖll send a nice letter to their customers telling them theyGÇÖre increasing the cap. ItGÇÖs a lot easier to adjust caps upwards than downwards!
Q: Will these caps achieve their objective?/u>
Good question (glad I asked :-) ). On the one hand you can say GÇ£yesGÇ¥, because hard core P2P sharers - this apocryphal "5%" - tend to move to ISPs that are not capping, or have published higher caps. So if these users genuinely represent a tiny minority then caps have done the job and got them off GÇ£my networkGÇ¥.
But if applications like iPlayer are converting light users into heavy users then the model starts to break.
Cheers,
Geoff
Comrades,
Like Australia, weGÇÖve had this sort of bandwidth capping over here in the UK for several years now, so I thought IGÇÖd share some experience, as well as some of the issues this raises with end users.
Remember that the UK is much more competitive than the US in this respect. 30% of our telephone exchanges (local offices??) are unbundled. I have a choice of several dozen ISPs for residential service (although they will all be carried over BT Wholesale ultimately because my exchange is not unbundled).
I gather this isnGÇÖt the typical situation in the US, where there tends to be less choice.
Q: How much of oneGÇÖs allowance do legitimate applications consume?
In the past the answer was GÇ£not muchGÇ¥. OldPOTS mentioned adverts, which are clearly not solicited by the users. I suspect youGÇÖll find that even these only scratch the surface of a typical B/W cap. If IGÇÖm browsing the web, sending email GÇô even working from home, and I have a clean PC, itGÇÖs unlikely IGÇÖll hit my cap (15GBytes per month).
Q: So what does use up the allowance?
In the UK caps were introduced to deter the P2P file sharers GÇô who (at that time) typically represented less than 5% of the customer base. LetGÇÖs be honest GÇô historically most P2P involves illegal (ie. copyright infringing) content. This is mostly still true today. I could burn through my monthly allowance in about 2 days if I turn on uncontrolled P2P. Downloading just the latest series of Boston Legal would pretty much do it. But this is breaking the law, and so the UK ISPs have always had a moral argument in addition to the GÇ£weGÇÖre protecting the majority of our users and ensuring they have good serviceGÇ¥ argument.
But since January 08 the BBC has been offering GÇ£catch up TVGÇ¥ using its iPlayer service, and UK ISPs are seeing an increasing % of their customers moving into the GÇ£heavy userGÇ¥ category. This use of the Internet is perfectly legal. And weGÇÖre not talking about rubbish content that strewn with commercials here GÇô this is BBC content (the Gold Standard), and no commercials at all. Cripes, no wonder itGÇÖs popular (over 2 million regular users now).
Q: Does botnet traffic chew up my allowance?
Possibly. The technology to detect infected users has existed for several years. In fact the Ellacoya and Sandvine boxes that the ISPs use for traffic measurement can also be used to detect infected users because they send a lot of spam (spam is still the most profitable way for the botnet controller to use the zombie PCs under his control). IGÇÖve spoken to many UK and US ISPs in the past and they have a gut feel that between 25% and 33% of their users are infected in this way. But the problem is that thereGÇÖs little incentive for them to spend the time to decontaminate those users.
I suspect the people reading this site are significantly less likely to have an infected PC. But in the general population, infection is extremely common.
And botnet traffic will generally speed up and slow down to GÇ£fillGÇ¥ the available pipe. So yes, it could easily trigger these cap restrictions. WhoGÇÖs to blame? The GÇ£lawGÇ¥ (such as it is) says that the user is. They are the ones responsible for keeping their PC clean. Mere conduit implies that the ISP is not responsible.
Q: Are these US caps too small?
TWCGÇÖs cap numbers are at the high end of the typical UK allowance. Most UK ISPs over here will start to throttle GÇ£unlimitedGÇ¥ services after 10-20 GBytes of peak time download in a monthly measurement period. My ISP has a pretty sophisticated throttling approach where P2P traffic is throttled back but interactive traffic is not.
An interesting statistic would be to know what % of a typical ISPGÇÖs users are being throttled in a typical month. Again, we hear this GÇ£5%GÇ¥ number bandied about a lot, but I donGÇÖt have access to that data.
IMHO I think TWC is taking the right approach by offering a "small" (compared to the other US ISPs mentioned) cap to start with. After 6 months of real life service, maybe theyGÇÖll send a nice letter to their customers telling them theyGÇÖre increasing the cap. ItGÇÖs a lot easier to adjust caps upwards than downwards!
Q: Will these caps achieve their objective?
Good question (glad I asked :-) ). On the one hand you can say GÇ£yesGÇ¥, because hard core P2P sharers - this apocryphal "5%" - tend to move to ISPs that are not capping, or have published higher caps. So if these users genuinely represent a tiny minority then caps have done the job and got them off GÇ£my networkGÇ¥.
But if applications like iPlayer are converting light users into heavy users then the model starts to break.
Cheers,
Geoff
This is a very interesting point.
My gut feel is that, without video of some kind, it's hard to break the typical cap limit.
So what kinds of "legal" video are there?
Well, YouTube of course. But these are usually pretty short videos, of relatively low quality (300kbps).
Then there are retail video services, like iTunes (which has only this week extended its video offering over here to the UK). The prices for UK iTunes video are ludicrously high - it's about the same price to go an buy the DVD in most cases. But I'm sure we'll see an adoption of this service.
Then there's BBC iPlayer, which I mentioned in my post. This is free, legal, does not have commercials, and is premium content. So it's very, very popular.
BUT - before iPlayer I suspect the most common form of video (and therefore of bandwidth consumption) was P2P illegal file sharing.
To answer your question though - at least in the UK the ISP is protected by "mere conduit"? UK ISPs are desperately avoiding a test case for mere conduit, but I think it still applies here. I've been told by an EU official that in many European countries mere conduit is already dead.
What's the situation in the US?
Cheers,
Geoff
Yes indeed.
In the UK there's a vague assumption on the contention ratio in the backhaul connection from the local office. Historically it was always quoted as 20:1 for business services and 50:1 for residential services. But ISPs are not required to publish their actual contention rates per exchange, so it's anybody's guess what the actual numbers are. Needless to say, the more users that an ISP can cram onto a given amount of backhaul capacity, the better their economics.
But the downside of higher contention rates is that GÇ£demandingGÇ¥ applications will start to suffer. HereGÇÖs an example from my own experience.
If I look at an iPlayer streamed TV program during the working day (letGÇÖs assume IGÇÖm taking a well-deserved coffee break shall we?), then the 512kbps video stream runs perfectly.
However, in the evenings I often find that the iPlayer video will freeze, and will try to buffer the video stream. The same thing is true for YouTube videos.
So, given it works in the day I assume my local loop (which runs at 2Mbps) is not the bottleneck. ItGÇÖs probably the fact that in the evening all of my pesky neighbours are using their broadband connections and the backhaul is overloaded.
I assume that the high contention rates I quoted above are based on early broadband experience, that predates the wide use of video streaming. So thatGÇÖs what I meant by GÇ£light usersGÇ¥. The ISP has dimensioned the backhaul (and thereby their business model) on the basis of low demand applications.
But the iPlayer, which is a high demand (well, I suppose 512kbps is sort of high) application thatGÇÖs perfectly legal, and extremely popular. So itGÇÖs transforming a large fraction of the ISPGÇÖs customer base from GÇ£lightGÇ¥ to GÇ£heavyGÇ¥ users, and thatGÇÖs what is hitting the business model.
You raise an excellent point about ISPs tracking technology advances, but the fact is that the backhaul is the least GÇ£unbundledGÇ¥ part of the UK broadband network. Given there are over 5500 exchanges in the UK itGÇÖs going to be interesting to see how we (the UK) can support a large scale upgrade. 21CN should help a bit, but itGÇÖs late arriving unfortunately.
As you say, where colo is possible economically, then the problem is easier to solve because there is likely to be a high density of users in that area. Out of the 5500 or so UK exchanges, the usual figure for high density locations is 800. This is the number often quoted for LLU candidates, but it's logical to assume they're good candidates for competitive backhaul too.
Cheers,
Geoff
Geoff, nice post. Can you elaborate on what you meant by the above?
I'm thinking the model should support increased demand by increasing supply while reducing prices, matching technological advancements. We've seen this in consumer purchased technologies for decades now. In the US we see this happening at internet colos. Prices stay flat or decrease while per unit technology delivered increases.
One comment.
I believe in that rj is implying that UGC has not taken over professional content because of the issues in the network.
This is not correct. UGC is 99% awful, much worse than the worst thing done professionally. Take a look at this year's multiple award winner for a serial....
www.watchtheguild.com
I am not saying that there is not some good UGC. Just that the quantity is very low compared to professional content.
Also, you used to be right about TW and TWC but....
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15...
So, 2 weeks ago.
seven
I'm not sure if I'm answering your question and fgoldstein knows the policy, regulatory, and legal issues better than me but here is what I understand.
In the US, the ISPs are somewhat insulated from legal liabilities associated with copyright violations. Business wise it's a different story. The media companies hold the cards with respect to high value content. The history of mass media is one where the distributors (RF, cable, microwave, etc.) have the weaker position. The few conglomerate media companies have controlled policy as well as the purse strings. To a limited extent user generated content and piracy is eroding this control. But user generated content is fundamentally dependent upon common carriage regulation which is eroding due to a belief in facilities based competition. The net long term probable outcome is that application independent networks to consumers will suffer from lack of investment while the media companies will fight to maintain their intellectual property rights which drive their revenues. TWC is owned by a media company so them creating revenue from the piracy may be preferred over the theft with no revenues. If these revenues are large enough than the free rider problem shifts to content production and we end up with US quality programming which is much, much worse than that produced by the BBC.
It was politics mixed with greed mixed with corruption which has never seen the light of day. It's demonstrates how Wall Street really works much of the time in my opinion. Crooks everywhere where honest work is rarely accomplished and rarely rewarded. Not much different than the guilded age.