On Mon, 2008-04-14 at 00:27 +0100, Greg Thomas wrote:
On 13/04/2008, Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk wrote:
Although the whole ISP's asking for kickback from the beeb to supplement their service costs is a slippery slope. As a licence fee payer I would strongly object to some of my fee going to ISP's that have oversubscribed their systems, even more so when it is for a system to which I have limited access because the BBC won't release a linux client.
And yet you presumably have no problem with the BBC paying Eutelsat or the terrestrial equivalent to transmit programs.
That's different though I think. The BBC are already paying to host the content, run the infrastructure etc..licence money is already going into the project and I have no problem with that. What I object to is them being forced to pay what is essentially the other half of the peering just because their content happens to be popular.
John had a good point, without content domestic broadband would be pretty worthless. Yet demands for payment made by ISP's just because your content is popular/bandwidth intensive is a huge step against net neutrality because presumably, if you simply refuse to pay then access to your content will be bandwidth limited. In conjunction with recent comments made by the CEO of Virgin Media it looks like Net Neutrality is most certainly dying if not already dead. Forget DRM etc, this IMO is currently the biggest threat to freedom on the Internet.
There was a broadband provider price war and IMO many providers are selling their services at a price that is unsustainable if people actually start using it.
We're getting well off topic, here, but is there perhaps a case for a publicly funded 'base' service, for say SD PSB channels, and an individual funded services (via the ISP) for, e.g. multi-channel or HD channels.
No that is still broken, Internet access should be neutral. Ok so with traffic shaping done by a lot of ISP's that hasn't technically been true for some time, but it is not generally discriminatory to a specific content provider, just a specific protocol.
If the BBC want to offer an HD service and then charge extra for access to it then fine but nowhere in this should the ISP of the consumer be involved.
Since the mass availability of Broadband in this country we have gone from-
It's unlimited and always on to It's unlimited and always on (within our fair usage terms) to Ok so actually it is capped
and now it is being proposed that as well as being capped, if we all go to a particular popular content provider even whilst presumably staying within our usage cap then that provider is going to have to pay our ISP as well as for their own hosting, i.e the ISP's half of whatever peering arrangements are in place.
If the price ISP's are charging consumers doesn't stack then they need to raise the prices whist still offering a neutral connection. Otherwise not only will the service become discriminatory but also it will be impossible to compare ISP's service. For example whilst ISP A may be offering the same overall connection speed as ISP B, ISP A may be limiting access to one of your favourite sites whilst ISP B has forged a deal with said site and has no such restriction.