BBC iPlayer vs UK ISPs - Network Contention

4th April 2008

This story really wound me up. ISPs attitude to its responsibilites has been a sore point for some time with me; ever since my online gaming days of Earth & Beyond, CS and the like network contention has been a sticky issue.

First lets go over what an ISP should do. When it sells you a 4mb line, you get a 4mb connection to the internet almost all the time; I can accept network outages and local hub upgrades etc. Their advertising should reflect the realitly of the situation, so when it says £20 per month gets you a 4mb line then thats what you should get. This is not what happens...

When selling you a 4mb line, you dont get a 4mb line. What you actually get is a 4mb limited connection to a bigger line, say 100mb. When this line is quiet thats fine, you get 4mb. However, when you sell 100 4mb connections all connecting to that same 100mb pipe then you will get issues.

Lets say that out of those 100 people a quarter of them start to download large files; linux distros and albumns off iTunes for example, this creates a huge demand on the main 100mb line. Lets say those 25 people max out their limited connections, 25 x 4 = 100... What are the other 75 people meant to do for network connections?

Those other 75 people are just trying to surf the net, so using say (75 x 0.5mb) 37.5mb, so far that 137.5mb on a 100mb line, whops! Can someone say over selling??

As 137.5mb doesn't fit in to a 100mb pipe, everyone gets slowed down; so that 4mb limit on your line just dropped to about 3mb. This is what is called network contention and it sucks!

Recently certain ISPs have decided that because they have oversold their main pipes in that fashion that the service causing this spike should pay towards the ISP upgrading their network to cope! What a joke! My favourite so far is Simon Gunter from Tiscali who claims the BBC should pay Tiscali money because they can't cope with demand on their network!

Lets get this straight, the ISPs oversold their main lines, all those people heard about the iPlayer, started using it, created more then 100% traffic peaks becuse of the overselling. Then the ISP tells the BBC to cough up so it can upgrade that main line to actually be able to cope with the demand? Does that seem right to you? Sounds like an idiot to me..

Why can't we just get what we pay for.. If you plan on selling 100 4mb connections, lay a 400mb main line in the first place! When I go to a supermarket and buy 4 oranges, I get 4 oranges. If I didn't the supermarket would be in trouble. Yet these ISPs get away with it because of that fine print in the contract that mentions network contention. 

I hope now with the BBC on the side of the gamers and geeks we can finally get rid of that network contention open ended clause and replacing with something closer to an SLA; where the company has to promise a certain percentage of that 4% will be available at all times. That way we can all make a more informed choice. I would much rather have a gaurented 99% of 3mb than 70% of 4mb...

Until this is sorted I would highly recommend everyone downloading every possible show via the iPlayer, just to ram this home to the stupid ISPs!!

For more a details, and less ranting, about the issue between ISPs and the BBC take a look at the full article here.