BT Wants Cash For iPlayer, Video Bandwidth 229
eldavojohn writes "British Telecom is asking for more money for the bandwidth that iPlayer and video streaming sites eat up. The BBC's Tech Editor is claiming that 'Now Britain's biggest internet service provider is making it clear that, in a cut-throat broadband market, something is going to have to give — and net neutrality may have to be chucked overboard.' The BBC and BT are currently already in talks over how to get past this together. This might sound like a familiar battle from over a year ago."
This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
BT have a TV over the internet offer called "BT Vision" its suffering (and just lost its CEO) in competition with Rupert "any view that pays" Murdoch's Sky. Now if BT could get a richer experience out of iPlayer and access to a longer back catalogue than simply the last 7 days then this would help them in competition with Sky.
So I'd expect this to end up with BT agreeing to support iPlayer in the same way but an "interesting" tie-up between BT and the BBC around the delivery of iPlayer+ features to its BT Vision customers.
Non-issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Share the cake... or make the cake bigger (Score:5, Insightful)
So video over IP is wasting BT's bandwidth eh? How about increasing the bandwidth instead of reducing the share of it subscribers are allowed to get? This is typical greedy telco mentality: let's milk the existing infrastructure for all it's worth, instead of investing in said infrastructure. Heck, if Japan or Korea ISPs can provide very high bandwidth residential internet to their customers, why couldn't the UK? This is called investing in the future, and it's what we need in times of economic crisis.
Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
BBC shouldn't give a penny to BT. They should cut them off.
From the perspective of BTs dumb mass audience, who chose BT because it bundled the prettiest ADSL modem, the word will quickly spread that BT is pants because your can't get "teh TVs".
Problem solved.
Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
When people sign up for broadband, one of the main things they want it for in this country is iPlayer. If iPlayer doesn't work well on BT Internet, they will go to another ISP where it does work. That will be a selling point for their competitors. For that reason, BBC can tell them to get lost.
Needs a translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, fuck you BT. You made your bed; Lie in it.
What do you expect? (Score:3, Insightful)
When you charge pennies for a service - the big UK ISPs have been on a race to zero for years now - you'll come unstuck when people actually want to use the service. Duh. Whatever happened to charging a fair price, and then delivering a fair service? It's not rocket science.
Discovering unlimited internet use (Score:3, Insightful)
If all these ISPs realized advertising unlimited internet use would sell people on the idea they could use unlimited internet use maybe they should have built their infrastructure to handle it, or not market it as such. If they have anyone to whine to, it's themselves and their own short sightedness.
Having worked with... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, BT, you still have a freaking monopoly, despite the creation of OpenReach. If you can't make money with a monopoly, you deserve to go under.
Re:This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Non-issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should the BBC cut them off? If BT doesn't want their users accessing the video content THEY should block it. Once their clients realize that they can't get what their paying for over BT it will quickly lose its status as 'largest'. Market forces are at work and BT is plugging its ears and going nya nya nya nya, let them go the way of the Dodo.
Re:Competition (Score:3, Insightful)
So if BT internet play silly buggers with iPlayer you can migrate and you will see a difference, provided that the problem lies with the isp and the amount of money they're prepared to spend on their backhaul and pipe. If the problem is that if the BT Wholesale network can't cope, then that's a different kettle of fish!
Re:This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
No doubt there are some influential contacts in the government who get paid well for these agreements. If you ask me the expense scandal in the UK is just the top of the iceberg and our governments are basically nearly as corrupt as the US, they just make more effort to hide it.
Re:Share the cake... or make the cake bigger (Score:5, Insightful)
The only issue here is who's going to look like the bad guys for making the populace pay for upgrading BT's infrastructure. BT would prefer that the BBC do the squeezing, that's all.
This is exactly right, but it's pretty evident that the BBC shouldn't be paying for general-purpose bandwidth. Just because iPlayer's the driver right now, doesn't mean all kinds of other services that rely on high bandwidth will benefit.
If it's to be subsidised (for which there is a case - having consumers with good connectivity stimulates the online economy) it should be from some other form of taxation.
Re:Non-issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Boycott them financially instead. It makes more sense. Money is your weapon.
Re:Share the cake... or make the cake bigger (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a really generic argument, so I'm guessing that you are not from the uk. Correct me if I'm wrong.
BT have already squeezed the money out for their upgrade. After the Century-21 roll-out they have enough fibre in place to handle video traffic. After getting to maintain their monopoly for a few years beyond when they should have because DSL didn't fit into the legal view for breaking their monopoly on POTS - they got to rape the entire UK internet industry for bandwidth charges.
They have already collected enough tolls. This is not about who pays for infrastructure upgrades. The backbone is in place, only the exchange endpoints need upgrading and they do not pay for that. Local loop unbundling means that the ISPs pay for that.
The truth is that BT is a monopolist who grew fat collecting tolls. And it wants to find a new place for tolls now that it is not allowed to collect the old ones.
BT's Heavy User package (Score:5, Insightful)
BT have a Heavy User package (£20.54pcm) that contains the following as part of it's description...
If you can't afford to provide it then don't advertise it, fuckwits. Manage your customer's expectations properly and stop making promises you can't keep, it's a much more sustainable business model.
Re:Encyption (Score:1, Insightful)
When all the bits look the same, there is no way to discriminate between them.
The IP's of the BBC aren't going to be changing on a daily basis - you can match on that.
Re:This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
The Vision+ box is a digital TV recorder that lets you pause, record and rewind live TV.
Record and store up to 80 hours of Freeview TV with the huge 160 GB hard drive.
The Vision+ box's dual tuners can record one or two programmes at once while you watch another recording.
The TV guide shows scheduling 14 days in advance. Simply press the R button twice to record a whole series.
The HD Vision+ box gives you selected films and TV in crystal clear, High Definition picture and sound quality.
Any pay per view movies, sport, music or TV shows you watch will be added to your next BT Vision bill. If you take one of our Value Packs, you will be billed in advance each month.
Combined with bittorrent, I already have what they are offering. Except their speeds are derisory. I recently switched provider to Be [bethere.co.uk], and experienced a doubling in download bandwidth, and a trebling in upload bandwidth, for 25% less per month including a fixed IP. Plus BT claimed that "it was not possible to get faster speeds on my line". Funny that, considering you need a BT phone line to sign up with Be. But now I'm not with BT broadband, I can't get BT Vision. So there was no net neutrality in this case. All their stuff was prioritised already.
Re:Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking as an ISP senior network engineer for over a decade:
Yes. BT can get stuffed, and any other provider who violates net neutrality will see me vote with my feet.
Re:That's the way BT is (Score:3, Insightful)
There's an agreement in place since the government essentially said "do this voluntarily, on your terms, or we'll make it a legal requirement". Believe me, the terms written up by a bunch of network engineers are far better - the original request included logging anyone who hit something on the list, which was thrown out early on due to the possibility of false positives.
You, Sir, are a useful idiot, and you fail to understand even the basic principles of negotiation.
(1) Any negotiation must start with the skilled party requesting far more than he expects to get. The concessions merely amount to reducing the agreed terms to what that party was hoping for. In this case, "logging everyone who hits one site on the IWF list" was not going to happen anyway - but if you ask for it, your opponent will rejoice when that term is conceded, while the government can be content that what they were actually aiming for, which is an infrastructure for censorship, has been successfully implemented.
(2) "Do this voluntarily or we'll force you to do it" is logically equivalent to "we're forcing you to do it". EITHER you do it OR you do it.
(3) Network engineer terms, oh really? No "bunch of network engineers" would agree to reporting as 404 what is (generously) a 403 Forbidden. A "bunch of network engineers" getting the final say would not have the final detour of the list being through government, which can add sites at will and in secret.
The IWF has a singular purpose: ensuring that there is a framework for censorship on the Internet, to be used whenever necessary. Also, if it became necessary to do some official logging, it'd just be be a matter of saying "please forward us those logs periodically". Of course IWF hits are logged unofficially at least temporarily, because all hits to IWF list IP addresses go via caching servers, and you can assume that any server has logging on unless there's some mound of evidence to show otherwise.
Re:Share the cake... or make the cake bigger (Score:4, Insightful)
Dodgy analogy: If Tesco were selling soooo many packets of Corn Flakes that they were running out of space in their warehouses, then using the BT-School-of-Business route, they'd want to charge the customer the same for the Corn Flakes and *also* charge Kelogs for the privileged of Tesco selling them! Whereas obviously, they need to make enough money by selling products to invest in building the infrastructure to deliver it all.
Actually... I don't normally resort to expletives, but what sort of a fucking prick is John Petter? I mean seriously, either he's a clown with no business nouse at all (has he though of a career in banking?), or he *does* know exactly what he's doing and he's trying to take the public for a ride.
I'm sick an tired of these cunts -- we need to have a cull!!
Re:Wrong Approach (Score:3, Insightful)
BT operates a slave plantation in India for customer support. They are the singular worst customer support I have ever encountered. They tell you absolutely anything you want to hear, lying in the process. A engineer needed to come and check the line. However it took 3 weeks of shouting at customer support to actually get someone to turn up. Every day we were promised the engineer would come the next day, they never ever showed. In the end had to make an official complaint by snailmail to get someone to turn up.
And let's not forget Phorm.
BT would be much better concentrating on fixing their massive problems with their service than talking about iPlayer. The BBC should tell BT to go fuck themselves.
Re:Share the cake... or make the cake bigger (Score:1, Insightful)
BT has millions of customers who *already* pay for an internet service. Do they expect to be paid twice???
If BT can't afford to upgrade its infrastructure, then that's their problem. They can easily pass on the cost to their customers, the ones who are demanding BBC content.
I pay the BBC (through the licence fee) to provide a content service. I'm not a BT internet customer. Why should my tax pounds be used to pay for BTs infrastructure? It's got nothing to do with me.
Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just BT believing that because they used to be the national phone service they have a right to dominate any communications market and charge whatever they like.
There is a simple solution to this: the BBC should just ignore them. If they decide to limit or block access to iPlayer then I'm sure their competition will make mincemeat of them given its popularity. All they need to do is advertise that they have iPlayer access and let the market decide - this is one time that leaving things to the market might actually work.
Re:Share the cake... or make the cake bigger (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think anyone misses your point that someone has to pay for it. The problem is that we are paying for it and BT still aren't investing.
The issue is that countries like Japan, South Korea, Sweden have much heavier internet users due to IPTV, VOIP and that sort of thing being more common place couple with piracy being even more prolific over there and yet still manage to provide faster connections at a lower price and hence a lower profit margin.
BT has the money to do this but due to having an effective monopoly still in the UK albeit not as strongly as they used to they can get away with not bothering to upgrade as they're still guaranteed a massive set of customers that have no choice but to go via them no matter how bad a service they provide because they pocket the money rather than investing in better infrastructure.
With 21cn BT argued that everyone else should have to pay for it but them, it was an infrastructure upgrade but they were refusing to roll out access to it unless they got government subsidy or unless OFCOM changes the rules to help them hold onto their monopoly. BT had already paid for the upgrade but was simply holding the country to ransom over it. The very fact they could afford to do it in the first place but refuse to roll it out is proof enough that they had the money to pay for it and where do you think that money came from? It came from the customers - that is, we've already paid for it, but BT want us all to pay for it a second time over so that they could take the cost of the upgrade as pure profit.
There is no shortage of money to pay for infrastructure in the UK, the amount of customers, the proportionally lower amounts of bandwidth usage compared to many other nations with better, no more subsidised telecomms networks, the higher charge for internet access and bandwidth, the higher costs of line rental than most other companies means that the money is already there for infrastructure upgrades.
The parent to your post was right - this really is about convincing the telco to invest rather than increase profits as far as possible without doing so. What do BT care what the interests of the country are if they can boost their profits by literally billions by not bothering to invest and there being no serious competition to leave them worried? Again, BT do not have a shortage of money to do infrastructure improvements as they've demonstrated every time they've finally been forced into it or similar so the who pays question is not relevant here because we, the customers have again already paid. In a way I can even understand why BT want to hold onto the profits - so they can invest abroad now they're truly global and they can grow as a company, the problem is this doesn't benefit the country and as they do have what is effectively a state granted monopoly as a result of privatisation then they should be forced into factoring in the needs of the country into their calculations that made them into the global business giant they are now.
I believe this will change, competitors are coming around and growing, but they're still no real threat so we're looking at at least 5 - 10 years at minimum. There's still too many legacy issues that allow BT to maintain a stranglehold such as the fact that if you go with a new telco and they go bust (ironically because of BTs monopolist business practices) then you default back to BTs network - not a competitors, but BTs.
Re:Non-issue (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah but this will hit "the clueless idiots" where it hurts. If the other ISPs advertise that you can get BBC iPlayer with them but not with BT I imagine that there will be quite an effect.
Very true. But by allowing BT to open this box of Pandora you never know what's next. This time it's iPlayer, what happens when you have to choose an ISP based on a package of 100+ services? How is such a zombie consumer supposed to know the "right" choice? We both know what happens. Whatever is more convenient will be the choice, mimicing what the Telecom industry has become and killing anything even related to net neutrality, shifting the power to control internet to the corps. Nobody gives a rats ass about the rates anymore, it's about having to lift as few fingers as possible. We take phones for granted, and we're very close to have the same mentality towards internet.
In this matter I'd sacrifice freedom of choice for total freedom. Besides ISPs would only be shooting themselves in the foot as they will have a hard fucking time trying to keep up with internet, harming only one party: the consumer. Today it's iPlayer, who knows where tomorrows traffic goes?
I see nothing good come out of this. And when I see nothing good I see no reason to adopt it. I don't know if it's just me but that's just how my logic works.
Re:Consumer should pay (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue in the UK is that they do pass it on to consumers already but that that extra cash that should be for infrastructure is just pocketed as extra profit instead by either the ISP or BT.
British users are already not as heavy bandwidth users as in other countries that pay less for a faster connection with more bandwidth. As BT have a monopoly they can get away with this as there is no true nationwide competition threat to cause them any harm when they do do this.
BT paid for an infrastructure upgrade already called 21cn but they refused to roll out access to it initially until OFCOM change competition rules to help them maintain their monopoly and further increase profits. As such they clearly have the money in their profits to pay for these upgrades, they just have no motivation to do them, and when they do, they only do so with the promise that they can hold onto their monopoly longer or extort money from ISPs by refusing to allow them access if they don't pay up meaning as soon as one ISP crumbles they all have to or lose out to the one that did crumble.
Re:Simple solution (Score:3, Insightful)
What they have to advertise is not 'we have iPlayer' but 'we don't have restrictions'. If you start advertising 'we have iPlayer', what will be next; 'we have Google', 'we have Wikipedia? After a while you just start getting a channel lineup much like current cable/satellite which the ISP's would love; you just cache the daily version of your channels or propose to have certain media hosted in your own data centers and they won't have to pay for the upkeep of pipes that create the Internet anymore.
For most consumers this won't make a lot of difference, they will pay the same, they will be persuaded to believe that this is actually a 'good thing' -- filtered for the children and (initially) cheaper -- and you'll end up with a bunch of local networks connected to a BBS where the ISP has a monopoly over content.
Re:Market forces in natural monopolies..? (Score:3, Insightful)
What? There are only, like 100 of the damned things.
This isn't like the US where the ISPs have carved out local monopolies.
BT operates at several different levels. They sell bandwidth to the 100 odd ISPs that operate in your exchanges because they control the actual physical infrastructure. If BT can get away with it (probably) then they can increase the charge to the ISPs for their customers accessing iPlayer. Whereas what they should be doing is charging a cost for bandwidth regardless of its use.