BT vs. iPlayer
After much rumbling in the background over the past few months, BT finally fired a shot across the BBC’s bows. It accused content creators in general, and the BBC specifically, of “getting a free ride”, because it wasn’t paying BT to carry iPlayer traffic to its customers.
Confused? You will be.
The Internet, broadly speaking, works like this: you pay for transit—that is, a connection to the Internet—from a provider; they may well pay their provider for a bigger, fatter, pipe that they send all of their customers’ traffic down, or they might have peering arrangements with other ISPs. This works, and indeed works well. If I rent a server in a co-location facility, I can pay a set amount of money (and not a huge amount, either), for a dedicated 10, 100, or 1000 megabit connection that I can utilise to my heart’s content 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The bigger pipe I want, the more I pay. Simple.
In consumer-land, things work similarly: you pay your ISP for a cable or ADSL connection, and they either peer, or pay somebody else to do it for them. Quite often, it’s BT Openreach—the wholesale access arm of BT—who provides the actual Internet access infrastructure and transit. There’s a snag, though. As a consumer, you can’t just get a dedicated 100 megabit connection and fill it with whatever you like, because you’re not in a datacentre. As such, it’s not particularly convenient for ISPs to offer such facilities, and so they would cost an awful lot of money.
In order to remain competitive, ISPs give you something else instead. Today’s word of the day is “contention”.
Back when ADSL was introduced in the UK, lots of people talked about contention. “Is yours a 20:1?” “No, unfortunately it’s 50:1”. You don’t hear it so much today. Big ISPs certainly don’t talk about it if they can help it. That’s because many consumer ADSL connections have what’s called a “contention ratio” of 50:1. That means that in the telephone exchange you’re connected to, your Internet transit is actually divvied up between you and up to fifty other people nearby. As time has gone on, connections have become “faster”, with adverts extolling the virtues of high-speed broadband that lets you download so-many movies in an hour or the complete works of Shakespeare in ten seconds (is there actually anybody who does this?), but if several people do it at the same time, everything gets a lot slower very rapidly.
For all the talk of “faster connections”, our nation’s broadband infrastructure is built on the premise that most of the time, people just browse BBC News. Maybe you’ll look at YouTube, or buy an album from iTunes. These things use varying amounts of bandwidth, but won’t use it for very long, decreasing the chances that you’ll noticeably contend with other people. What you certainly shouldn’t do is use that high-speed broadband connection to watch TV from iPlayer all evening. That’s just not cricket, is it?
To account for the fact that ISPs have for years been trying to stuff the traffic from 50 people at once into a pipe made for one, and that it’s suddenly coming back to bite them, we’re seeing “throttling”. This is where it gets really weird. Rather than simply divide up the available bandwidth evenly between the number of people who are using it, or even reduce the bandwidth available to those people who are hogging the shared connection, ISPs have started throttling specific applications. Ostensibly, this is to ensure that we all have a “smooth experience”: in other words, to make sure that while you’re watching last night’s Eastenders full-screen on your PC, you’re able to browse the web at something other than a snail’s pace. Useful, no?
There are several quite significant flaws in this approach.
They do it at certain, pre-determined times of the day, irrespective of actual traffic levels. These periods are identified as “peak” time. That is, when people actually want to use their Internet connections for doing things like catching up on last night’s Eastenders.
They get it wrong. Traffic from music-streaming application Spotify, for example, was recently accidentally mis-classified as being peer-to-peer file-sharing, and throttled by some ISPs, rendering it unuseable. “Smooth experience”?
Pretty much every ADSL modem sold in the last 5 years or so has the ability to do “Quality of Service” without an ISP’s involvement. That is, if you want to be able to browse the web without incident while watching iPlayer, you can choose to prioritise web traffic yourself. No enforcement needed.
Unfortunately for BT, they tried this tactic and are rapidly coming to the conclusion that (a) consumers don’t like their ISP getting in the way of their favourite TV, and (b) it doesn’t actually solve the problem. Just like increasing peak-time rail fares doesn’t really reduce the number of commuters, it just makes the commuters less happy.
So, rather than fight with their own customers, BT have decided to take the fight to the content providers, and this is where the fun really starts. If you cast your mind back to the beginning of this post, where I talked about paying for transit, you’ll note that I mentioned a cost being involved. Money changes hands, between me, and the company who provides my transit. Simple, straightforward transaction. What happens if that server, and that transit, is being used to offer streaming video? What happens if it gets popular? Besides the fact that I’ll probably need some more servers, of course.
What happens if BT comes to me and demands I start paying them as well as my transit provider to account for the fact that my service is popular amongst their customers? What if they threatened to throttle my application if I don’t pay, resulting in a poor experience for their customers and my users, all because they over-sold their capacity and can’t keep pace with the demands placed upon their infrastructure?
Personally, I’d call that extortion.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what “net neutrality” is. Hopefully, you understand why it’s so important.
