last100 - Latest Comments in Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Patrick — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:01:24 -0000

I seriously hop this doesn't happen... I was just about to add online video.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Michael — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:39:33 -0000

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Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Kshl — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 04:38:02 -0000

hey guys... wot ye say about ADSL in Mauritius. The only ISP is Mauritius Telecom. For 256 kbps conection you pay about $30. You get a 1GB cap. After the 1GB cap, the speed is even less than dial up. There are also smaller ISPs, like nomad,... but these ISPS all take their connection from Mauritius Telecom. and their connection is far more crappy.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

H0rnet — Thu, 31 May 2007 11:15:22 -0000

John Thomas and Lesly Misteus hit the nail on the head. I work for a small ISP doing IP over SAT providing broadband like BW doing both voice and data. We manly provide access to constructing crews, remote parts of the world, and thrid world country's and Emergency Response Units.. Throttling back certain types of traffic and oversubscribing the only way anyone can provide affordable access. In our model, we get the double whammy. Insanely high BW cost over a satellite, then the circuit to the internet. We use TDMA, so streaming a video and alike kills the other users. You have to understand, that we provide business class BW. We do not sign up the typical home user so throttle back anything that not bushiness related. There's no way that P2P and BT fits in under that. The other thing that not mentioned here is the kind of traffic that P2P and BT creates. I've observed one customer have +13,000 connections to a P2P network.

If you put your bushiness hat on, it would not make sense to allow someone to consume 90% of the BW on something like P2P or BT when ERU's come online. In that sense, peoples life are at risk, one customer dose not have the right to download movie,songs..etc. We live in a big world with big demands, not just your house.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Lesly Misteus — Wed, 30 May 2007 19:33:59 -0000

Let's not use the term "dirty little secret"... ALL Network HAVE TO BE oversubscribed to be economically viable. ALL Networks, be they Roads or Communications. Think about, it is quite possible to build a road wide enough to NEVER have a bottleneck.. You could also build a Telecom Network that is non-blocking but most of this capacity (which would not come cheap) will not be used almost 90% of the time...Question How much will such networks cost? How much will YOU the user pay for this for the provider to recoup its investment? Oversubscription allows us to enjoy these relatively low-cost for high speed and it is a testimony to how well it works that we have high speed in our home.
Video on the present Internet infrastructures will tax it of that I am sure, it is a hard situation for ISP to provide video which tends to turn the oversubscription ratios on their heads. I believe, that the solution, strangely enough, resides in peer-to-peer like networks, which can be extremely efficient in streaming but this may depends on the relative popularity of a given stream..

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

John Thomas — Wed, 30 May 2007 13:04:06 -0000

Have any of you looked at the actual COST to the ISPs? Full T-1's from a quality upstream can cost $1000's per month, and yet you feel "entitled" to have this access for $39.99 per month? The reality is that speed costs money- how fast can you afford? There is a wireless ISP NextWeb (Covadwireless) here in the San Francisco Bay area that sells 1.5 Mbits/sec burstable to 6 Mbits/sec for $299 per month-that is a realistic price point. For those that have fiber and other *cheap* bandwidth, that is great for you. Most ISPs are not trying to rip you off, they are simply trying to make a living. If most ISP's were able to get 100 megabit upstreams for $1000 per month, you would see your prices fall like a rock. The reality is that many ISP's are paying 10's of thousand of dollars for their upstreams. Do you think they should offer 10 Megabits/sec uncapped to the end users for $20 per month? If their 10 meg upstream costs them $10,000 per month, they would have to have something like 3,000 users to be able to pay for the upstream and salaries for their employees. Then, when all 3,000 users got online, it would be a crawl.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Jimmy — Tue, 29 May 2007 15:51:20 -0000

Not true -- some Tier 1 ISPs do offer non capped or throttled products. This problem will be seen with the regional, reseller-model based ISPs.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

TDMPRO2K — Tue, 29 May 2007 14:54:57 -0000

I live in the UK, and it is a nightmare. I have recently moved ISP's due to they restricting my access. Unfortunately They just terminate your contract if you moan at them. I have now moved ISP's but I can see me moving again due to amount of bandwidth I used, due to downloads like 4OD.
The point that needs to be addressed is what is a reasonable limit?.. 60gb, 80gb or 100gb.
I can see that they have a problem with the amount of people using the ADSL service, but saying people who pay £35+ per month should be enough to cover cost to sort this out.

Hail to the ISP that says unlimited and is....................... I hope and prey it will come soon.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

deepak — Tue, 29 May 2007 13:24:12 -0000

well i am surprised to read it... if this is the condition in UK, one of the most developed nation in world, then now i feel contentious over the service my ISP is providing in India....

why can't people there in UK sue those creepy ISP's for throttling a so called "unlimited connection".

nice article by the way.....

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Alan Abbey — Tue, 29 May 2007 12:50:46 -0000

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Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Gerry — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:00:03 -0000

I agree completely, I am with the Australian ISP Telstra and am on the "Liberty Plan" (unlimited) and after a short 12gigs my 17mbs/256kbs cable is slowed 2 a near dial up speed of 64kbs. I believe that Telstra is not trying to rip me of but rather not with the times. Many ISP don't understand that there is a large shift to online video content, much of which is free and legally so (podcasting etc).

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Carl-Joel Andreen — Tue, 29 May 2007 07:26:23 -0000

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100% QoS in reality, not as aphrase, is one key element.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Geoff — Tue, 29 May 2007 06:42:44 -0000

I was so fed up with my ISP and their Fair Use Policy that I successfully sued them for throttling my Internet connection. The how-to gude is at http://demonic-tale.blogspo... if anyone wants to do it.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Pete White — Tue, 29 May 2007 06:17:31 -0000

I think its a growing problem in the UK for ISP's to throttle bandwidth, i'm with BT and they have throttled Bit Torrent bandwidth for months now meaning i'm lucky to get over 10kb/s between 4 and midnight.

Ofcom have recently made it a lot easier for people to move ISP's so hopefully as video on demand applications like 4OD become more popular the ISP's will respond by giving people more bandwidth.

I don't think it has anything to do with a 'nanny state' most just the fact that BT needs to invest more in our infrastructure.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Nathaniel — Tue, 29 May 2007 03:25:00 -0000

That is insane! $70 a month for 3GB download cap? Yikes!

The ISP I'm currently in a contract with is Tele2, a Swedish operator, and I'm getting 10mbit both ways through a fiber link. It's damn fast, and best of all, NO RESTRICTIONS. They do have rules against having file or web servers running though, which is kind of backwards when so many today have the possibility of serving their blogs from home.

I'm not sure how much traffic I'm consuming, but I think it's fair to guesstimate that it's atleast a gigabyte or two down each day, and maybe as much as 10-20 gb upload (each day). Still, Tele2 has said nothing and I've never noticed any kind of throttling or shaping of my network connection. Oh, and what am I paying? A little less than $20 :)

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Motorcycle Guy — Tue, 29 May 2007 00:07:00 -0000

I think when the whole network gets shut down at a later point in time you could say that peer 2peer network was illegal? I guess you can only classify them as such retroactively though.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Jason — Mon, 28 May 2007 23:40:31 -0000

@Oliver: It's not a UK "nanny state" issue, it's more about what happens when your ISP isn't big enough to get a decent deal for connectivity to the broader Internet.

Here in Australia, which is no more a nanny state that Switzerland, we have lots of small ISPs, covering areas which the big ISPs don't care about (because the costs are too high for the number of subscribers). The small ISPs get screwed on their upstream connection, and so the monthly download limits are pathetic.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Oliver — Mon, 28 May 2007 22:09:00 -0000

I think something like that can only happen in a nanny state like the UK. They want to "teach" people about anything they do, including the way they are supposed to use the web. Here in Switzerland you pay for 10Mbit, you get them together with a 10-20 ms ping, do what you want with it.
When I visited the UK two years ago I heard the term "contention ratios" for the first time in my life. The best ones were 5:1 and the worst 50:1, thought this was a joke. It is all in the bad style of european tradition selling everything technology and internet related like it would be something special, precious, or made of gold (just remember the days when 8mbit adsl would cost you severak 1000 bucks).
The ISPs attitude has always been the consumer should worship them for having the kindness of offering the unworthy user his crappy service at an outrageous price.

Also if you look at a country like South Korea where they are replacing the 100mbit connections with 1Gbit lines for every household and flatrates are cheap as bread you will realize that this whole matter is just about politics and certain interests groups who fear losing control about the consumer sheeps (e.g. mobile phone companies will try EVERYTHING to stop VOIP becoming affordable for mobiles in Europe, TV companies are afraid you might turn to some ITV channel from abroad instead of feeding on their crap etc.). But in the end they will lose.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

chris scott — Mon, 28 May 2007 21:06:31 -0000

I worked as a headend technician at a cable company for a few years where I helped manage the broadband / television infrastructure.

One thing cable companies are doing these days is duplicating analog channels into digital. in conjunction, they're flooding their market with cheap digital-decoders.

every analog tv channel takes up ~ 3Mhz (I forget) of bandwidth.

as the cable companies start to faze-out the analog channels, it should free up an awful lot of bandwidth, I figure.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Bryan — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:57:30 -0000

One more thing to keep in mind is who you're connecting to. If I use my 10Mbps connection to download a file from a server running a 56K connection, I'm not going to get 10Mbps. Also, as far as I know cable is shared bandwidth, but fiber is dedicated, meaning that you alone are using your fiber bandwidth instead of sharing it like a cable connection (correct me if I'm wrong). Distance to the nearest routing station can also affect speed...

At the same time, I have heard a few horror stories of people paying for an "unlimited" connection only to have their service cut (without warning) for going over the limit.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Devin — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:37:58 -0000

theoretically it would take 40 minutes to download 3GB...not 20.

this is not a 10megabyte connection we are talking about here...its megabit.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Hauke Kruppa — Mon, 28 May 2007 17:32:28 -0000

Oh, and by the way: It's only a BIT less. Check out http://www.speedmeter.de/ra... and stop generalising. Yes, it may be tough in UK and in some parts of the USA. But this is not caused by some sort of natural law or technical impossibilities. And if it comes to Norway, I guess the people in the UK and Germany both start crying - they outpower us all :)

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Hauke Kruppa — Mon, 28 May 2007 17:25:01 -0000

> The difference between advertised speeds and data speeds experienced
> by actual users is no longer a ‘dirty little secret in the broadband industry’,
> as numerous comments on various blogs and online commentaries attest to.
> And the phenomenon is just as prevalent in countries other than the UK, e.g.,
> US, Japan, France, Germany, etc.

Are U kidding me? Given, there were a few providers "shaping" the traffic here in Germany, but those were the cheapest of the cheapest. No traffic shaping if you stick to DSL AND telephone-providers here in Germany. Neither Telekom nor Alice nor Arcor are "shaping" any traffic. In some cases, the bandwidth is limited due to long telephone-lines or to technical limitations due to disturbances when too many people try to use DSL on nearby lines. But this is not a bandwidth problem - the ports are there, it's just that some cables are not shielded enough.

I am using a 16Mbit DSL and I never ever had any problems downloading what I want. Yes, there is a "fair use" paragraph in the contract, but it's not used by the companies mentioned above. It's bad press if they did. Btw: Of cource I use Video on Demand with 1 or up to 5 Mbit.

Prices: 16 Mbit down / 800 up (in real life, it's a bit less) for roundabout 50 Euros, including the base-tariff for your telephone.

Being a developing nation concerning fast internet access is *no* reason to say that other countries are the same!

Some people...

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

reech — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:40:09 -0000

The point is that the largely ignorant public at large have been sucker-punched once again.

They're certainly not going to be happy when they discover that they can't get their joost/whatever 24/7.

Re: Will ISPs spoil the online video party?

Phil Scheuster — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:02:14 -0000

I pay for verizon FiOS and get 20 Mbps constantly. In the last 6 months I've downloaded over 3 Terabytes of illegal video from giganews....Ive never had my bandwidth reduced or shaped.