Content is King!

Friday, 18 April 2008 09:53

Article Written for the Killarney Outlook 18 April 2008

If, like many, you have broadband then the broadband service you have is provided to you by an Internet Service Provider or ISP. In Ireland this body of companies include Eircom, BT, Perlico (aka Vodafone), O2 and so on.

I would imagine that they have spent some time following the murmurings of unrest emanating from their colleagues in the UK over the rapid growth of traffic from one web-site. Traffic from this website has depleted the available bandwidth on the ISP networks so much that the ISPs need to consider spending serious money on upgrades to ensure that they still can provide a service for their customers. Who owns this website from hell, the digital Genghis Khan laying waste to huge tracts of bandwidth?

Why it is the BBC.

It is a very compelling debate on a number of levels. The BBC recently released some software that allowed users to play BBC programmes across the Internet up to a week after they were first shown on air. This software is called the iPlayer.

Interestingly, the iPlayer uses peer-to-peer technology rather than the more traditional client-server. So, instead of the iPlayer (the client) contacting the BBC website (the server) to pull down the programme it can contact any number of machines running the iPlayer (it’s peers) across the Internet that have a copy of the programme and pull it from them. This is great for the BBC as it means they do not need as much I.T. infrastructure to distribute the programmes it has on offer but bad news for the ISPs who are now effectively distributing BBC material for free.

The ISP Tiscali CEO Mary Turner, has said that the ISPs should throttle back iPlayer traffic unless the BBC helps pay for the network upgrades necessary to carry the extra traffic. This throttling of traffic is called “Traffic Shaping” and happens a great deal in Europe. Peer-to-peer traffic represents a great deal of all Internet traffic, as much as 70 or 80 % and originates from the minority of Internet users who swap films, programs and other large files. The ISPs regularly “shape” this traffic to allow them to give the majority of users a better service.

Okay, so shape the BBC iPlayer traffic.

Well, it is not a straightforward as that. The people who are using peer-to-peer technology now are only the fore-runners of the majority and it is arguable that the iPlayer marks the beginning of the movement that brings such technology to the majority of Internet users that want to access media from the BBC or other media companies (say RTE) that copy the BBC’s work.

The ISPs, instead of traffic shaping, need to embrace this move and build the networks to cope with the capacity required. After all, technologies like the iPlayer will drive the consumer demand for higher capacity broadband links that the ISPs can charge for. Without companies like the BBC the Internet is just a load of Inter-connected Networks, that’s what the name means Inter-Net, it is the content that can be accessed that makes it compelling.

For the Internet user, we need to be prepared to pay for the level of service that we want. If we want to browse a few web pages then that is a low cost. If we want to handle large volumes of data such as video-on-demand then that is another, higher cost. The Internet has long offered a new publishing mechanism for many different forms of media because that is what it is, a revolution in how humankind publishes knowledge.

The ISPs have no business in throttling this revolution and every reason to promote it.