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Comment by scanr | Hacker News Reader

While I applaud their efforts, it's not like the BBC is unbiased. iPlayer benefits massively from 'net neutrality'. I recall speaking to an ISP who mentioned that 90% of their traffic during the olympics was iPlayer traffic.

I'm completely for net neutrality but I don't think it has addressed the potential for a tragedy of the commons.

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And that's the fundamental disconnect. The BBC is not getting a free ride. They are paying for the bandwidth they use - through their own ISP & CDN bills.

Granted, it's probably not the same provider, however why should that matter? They're paying to get that bandwidth somehow. They shouldn't have to pay even more to every little provider so their traffic is not deprioritized.

If the ISP needs more money, they should charge their users more. They're the ones using the bandwidth - not the BBC.

Not only that, but no ISP customer can ever download more from iPlayer or any other service than they have already paid for with their ISP subscription, or use more bandwidth than they were promised when they signed up.

On the one hand, ISP's offer "50Mb broadband", on the other they get the vapours when people actually use it.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this and I agree with you. The problem here is the ISP pricing models. As part of their marketing, they create 'uncapped' tariffs based on a business model that says that most users won't download a great deal of data. iPlayer breaks that model but what it should mean is that ISPs re-evaluate their pricing plans rather than creating a tiered internet which has the incentives in all the wrong places.

Amusingly, some ISPs do quite well out of iPlayer. Plusnet has a fantastically cheap capped deal (6.95, which I suspect is a loss leader) that users almost immediately exceed by switching on iPlayer.

Exactly. Requiring content providers like the BBC to subsidise ISPs because of their popularity is like asking Robinsons to pay Yorkshire Water because people are making so much of their orange squash.

You can see it as 90% of their traffic being caused by iPlayer, or as 90% of their business being due to the content provided (at no cost to them) by iPlayer.

An exaggeration, of course. But the principle stands. If (eg) streaming video were not so popular, far fewer people would pay for home internet access, and far fewer would pay a premium for 'high speed'.

ISPs are in business because they provide a means to reach content which those ISPs do not have to pay for the cost of producing. The notion that they should be paid by content providers so that they can charge content consumers to access that content is... nonsensical.

The BBC peers with everyone. How much of that 90% was unpeered traffic?

I believe that the cost is in BT Central Pipes traffic to the ADSL tail, which doesn't benefit from peering agreements.

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