Broadband News
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Traffic Management Legality
20 Jun 2009 | 11.04 Europe/London
Outlaw.com's recent podcast "Outlaw Radio" covered the legal background to ISP throttling, blocking or traffic management in the light of recent BT comments on carrying iPlayer traffic. The subject is also topical in view of Digital Britain's anti-piracy measures looking to use speed restrictions or content blocking to restrain repeat offenders.
Their conclusion is that UK law and OFCOM regulations would not stand in the way of an ISP restricting access to certain sites, types of traffic or applications. The only requirement would be that customers were notified that such practices may affect their service, and they should be given the opportunity to cease the contract if they did not accept the change. Net neutrality is not spoken here.
For example, if BT were to insist on receiving payment for carrying iPlayer traffic it would be legal for them to restrict the speed of the service if the BBC declined to pay up.
In a recent report Analysys Mason looked at the challenge of meeting increased demand for bandwidth to support video services over the internet and concluded that much of the demand could be met by throttling P2P file "sharing". So on the one hand we have throttling threatening the iPlayer and on the other it is being offered as the saviour to large scale transmission of video !
[ Outlaw.com ]
Their conclusion is that UK law and OFCOM regulations would not stand in the way of an ISP restricting access to certain sites, types of traffic or applications. The only requirement would be that customers were notified that such practices may affect their service, and they should be given the opportunity to cease the contract if they did not accept the change. Net neutrality is not spoken here.
For example, if BT were to insist on receiving payment for carrying iPlayer traffic it would be legal for them to restrict the speed of the service if the BBC declined to pay up.
In a recent report Analysys Mason looked at the challenge of meeting increased demand for bandwidth to support video services over the internet and concluded that much of the demand could be met by throttling P2P file "sharing". So on the one hand we have throttling threatening the iPlayer and on the other it is being offered as the saviour to large scale transmission of video !
[ Outlaw.com ]
If they just ran fibre to the home and build next gen network then none of this would matter, there would be room for everyone to do whatever they wanted and are prepared to pay for. I still think it is a smokescreen to cover up the failure of the incumbent to reinvest and futureproof its network. Too many bottlenecks in legacy copper network.
20 Jun 2009 | 12.34 Europe/London
The copper network is absolutely irrelevant to this as the traffic management is applied to ISP backhauls and interconnects that will be fibre links anyway.
Why do you think a FTTH network would be free of these issues ? they would in fact be many times worse as a single customer would be able to push out way more P2P traffic than they can now.
20 Jun 2009 | 19.38 Europe/London
If OfCom and the gov say no to this, then they would have more insentive to increase FTTC and FTTH. But no, they sooner get all British on us by taking the hell and giving us the most minimum service. 5.5mbps for me, on a 10mbps line, is pathetic in 2009.
21 Jun 2009 | 20.41 Europe/London
Its a disgrace; we all know that the majority of P2P traffic is illegal file sharing.
Its about time this piracy was stopped. I'm so sure that fighting this will release bandwidth on the infrastructure.
Lets face it; increasing capacity as mentioned above will only increase P2P activity and consume the additional bandwidth
10 Jul 2009 | 08.56 Europe/London