ISPs have been showing concern for the amount of bandwidth used by online video for some time now. However, the first salvo now seems to have been launched in a war that is likely to get very bloody over the next few years.
Net Neutrality Vs. Costs
Net Neutrality is the idea that all Internet traffic should be treated the same, no matter where it’s coming from, or what it’s being used for. It’s an important tenet for the future of online video because here is a medium that, by its very nature, requires more bandwidth than any other.
Cisco recently estimated that, by 2013, 90 percent of total Web traffic will be from video. This is down to the fact that video uses more data than Web pages, images, or text files. As well as the fact that online video is growing ever more popular, with new services being launched and new viewers discovering the joy of video on demand.
ISPs are not happy with the way things are going. Most, at least in the UK, now offer services with unlimited bandwidth and downloads. More fool them, maybe, but while offering customers these kinds of deals, they are starting to complain about being burdened with the costs of delivering online video.
BBC Vs. BT
This month began with the BBC complaining that BT Broadband customers on the 8 megabit per second (MBPS) package were having their bandwidth throttled if they watched the iPlayer at peak times. Customers who do so are seeing their service reduced to under 1Mbps between 1700 and midnight.
Now, according to the Financial Times, BT has gone one stage further, not only defending its actions but threatening that the situation has got to change or there will be consequences. John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business reportedly said:
“We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect.”
“ much bigger issue than the BBC iPlayer, it’s true of all forms of video content coming across the web. It’s becoming a more and more pressing issue.”
Petter is essentially asking the video sites to help BT and other ISPs pay for the costs they are generating for them. He even suggests that doing so could guarantee picture quality, which sounds like blackmail to me, or at least you scratch our back and we’ll scratch yours. I guess net neutrality hasn’t reached the UK yet.
Conclusions
I can certainly understand the ISPs concerns, because YouTube, the BBC iPlayer, Hulu, and the like do take a lot of bandwidth to operate. And the emergence of HD services is only going to make this worse. But surely it’s up to the ISPs to individually price their services to cover the costs of carrying online video traffic.
While it may mean we as consumers end up losing the unlimited packages which have become standard, it would seem the only plausible solution in a capitalist system. Especially as I think each and every online video service paying each and every ISP would be an impossible-to-manage idea.
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