BBC Delivery On-Demand Open Consultation

Well worth spending a few minutes filling in this open consultation if you care about how the BBC should develop it's on-demand content services. I made a point of emphasising my opinion that open standards should be embraced for content delivery and that third-party suppliers of the service (e.g. ISPs) should not be subsidised to allow/encourage the use of such on-demand features. I think the first point is one which everyone would instantly agree on, after all there is no technical reason to lock ourselves in to a proprietary system when there are so many alternatives. However, some people might query my second point so here's my logic.

It's fair to say Nildram, my ISP, has fallen from grace since it was taken over by Pipex. Not surprising I know; Pipex have a habit of taking a perfectly good ISP and spoiling everything which was good about them. It wasn't long before they suddenly introduced traffic shaping without any announcement, much to the disgust of many users including myself. They quickly backtracked and according to one "technical" member of staff they "turned the volume knob down to 1" on the throttling hardware so that traffic was practically unaffected. I love the image of an incredibly expensive and sophisticated piece of network equipment being operated with the same mechanism as a Marshall stack! Anyway, the aforementioned member of staff tried to explain the company's reasoning behind restriction of p2p traffic, which boiled down to the premise that because more users are utilising services such as Sky Anytime which deliver content over p2p, ISPs are incurring increased costs without compensation from the content providers. Roughly translated: "Yes we're selling you a broadband package with a 50GB per month bandwidth quota but we don't want you to actually use all of it... unless Sky are going to pay us". Net neutrality is just as much of a key issue over here as across the pond!

Of course I'm well aware overselling is not just common place but pretty much guaranteed in the ISP business. However, as many others were quick to point out, if you can't sustain a certain level of service within your existing pricing structure, re-evaluate your tariffs! Don't annoy your customers with throttling or march off demanding money from the companies who actually add value to the service you're providing! Those who don't want to use Sky Anytime, BBC's proposed on-demand service or any other high bandwidth service can opt for a low usage tariff while the rest of us pay a little extra to finance the investment in infrastructure to deliver the content we want.

/rant over ;)

Via happenchance