Broadband News

With the term "bandwidth throttling" almost becoming an expletive in the digital age, if you're going to sling it around you better have a good reason. The BBC's currently running an online article called "BT accused of iPlayer throttling" - and guess who's behind the accusation? You have to admit, it's quite impressive when your organisation's big enough to make its own news by reporting on itself.

So what exactly is the BBC saying? Here's their argument in a top-line nutshell: "Britain's biggest broadband supplier has been accused of limiting download speeds on its cheapest package without giving users a clear warning." Apparently British Telecom is restricting the connection speeds of at least some of its customers trying to stream video online via iPlayer and YouTube; those with BT's Option 1 package can only stream video at 1Mbps between 5 o'clock in the evening and midnight - not exactly the usual 8Mbps they can expect. With the BBC saying this effectively forces consumers to watch iPlayer in the lowest quality possible, you have to wonder how ISPs are going to cope with IPTV.

Because broadcast journalists can't take sides (newspapers are a different story), the BBC was even so kind as to issue itself a statement. "While customers listening to audio and lower quality video streams would be unaffected, we are concerned that at peak times some customers' higher quality video streams may be interrupted by buffering before falling back to a lower-quality version," it said. "This would suggest that traffic identified as BBC iPlayer traffic is being throttled back, thereby limiting the bandwidth used up by the service on slower connections."

Its report included a case study: that of Mr. Andrew Griffins, a BT customer living in sarf London. "From about 1730 onwards something like BBC iPlayer becomes impossible. It's fine during the day but come the evening, it's a no go," he told the BBC. He may have thought he was signing up for speeds between five and eight megabits-per-second but instead gets "nowhere near that. We've tried to contact [BT] numerous times to complain but without success," he says.

BT's official response is that its policies are designed "in order to optimise the experience for all customers." It's no secret that ISPs haven't been happy that the BBC's iPlayer has been jamming up their valuable bandwidth - and the odds are that BT's not happy with the Beeb going on the offensive. In a statement BT said, "We believe there is a real issue that content owners like the BBC need to address and we are currently in discussions with the BBC executive to ensure that our customers get the best possible experience in the future." Which part of the BBC didn't tell the BBC that, I wonder?

Meanwhile, the BT website actually states the following: "We do not impose any restrictions that affect the viewing quality of services such as BBC iPlayer... as these stream at up to 800Kbps. However, we do limit the speed of all video streaming to 896Kbps on our Option 1 product, during peak times only, which is between 5pm - midnight every day." BBC iPlayer is available at 500kbps, 800kbps, 1.5Mbps and in a "high definition" 3.2Mbps.

Of course, pretty much every contract that you might sign with an ISP has its small print. "Companies operating a traffic management policy usually hide their terms deep in the terms and conditions, making it difficult for customers wanting to get out of a contract," says Steve Weller of price comparison website uSwitch. But the bottom-line is that communications regulator OfCom doesn't require ISPs to specify the ins and outs of their polices at point of sale, as long as they have them on their website - and that's just if the ISP decides to conform to what is in any event a voluntary code.