In February, Virgin Media big cheese Neil Berkett quite literally offered his two cents on the net neutrality debate in an interview with the Royal Television society magazine; “This network neutrality thing is a load of bollocks,” he reportedly thundered.
The interview sparked fears among web video providers, such as YouTube, that Virgin have this week been trying to ally. It was implied that content providers who refused to pay levies to ISPs would see user traffic travelling to their sites shaped in order to meet bandwidth costs.
Berkett reportedly said video providers who don’t pay a congestion charge on the wider internet could see customer traffic shunted to slower “bus lanes”; it was this particular comment that send the WVPs running for the hills. A spokesman said that Berkett’s statements had been taken out of context, and asserted that: “We’re not suggesting there will be any denial of access to those who don’t want to pay.”
What is clear is that demand for popular applications such as YouTube and the BBC iPlayer has placed a huge strain on bandwidth. Virgin have circumvented this somewhat with direct peering with el Beebio in order for faster and more streamlined iPlayer usage, setting the precedent for other ISPs to follow suit.
Tiscali have been pretty vocal about BBC Technology Director Ashley Highfeild’s proposed Broadband Charter, and are adamant that Auntie et al should cough up. Simon Gunter, strategy chief at Tiscali said last week that it’s a “bit rich that a publicly-funded organisation is telling a commercial body how to run its business.”
Bandwidth famine in the UK is rife. Virgin Media’s forthcoming 50Mbps broadband service ought to help, but cable isn’t available everywhere to everyone. BT are soldiering on with their 100Mbps next gen trial, but new CEO Ian Livingstone on day one of hi new job, made it clear that BT would not be engaging in any phorm of big-scale fibre rollout unless Ofcom keep their tentacles at bay.
Speaking of Ofcom, they tellingly betrayed their grip on the situation with a recent announcement of an investigation into whether roll-out of fibre can be sped up by using existing utilities infrastructure, chiefly waterways. H20 Networks have been busy getting on with this on their tod for a while now, and way back when in ‘93, a company called Ipsaris unrolled 3,500 km of cable alongside British Waterways’ canal network. Iparsis was purchased in 2001 by Easynet, who are of course now owned by Sky.
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Frank said on 21 Apr 2008 at 7:42 am #
Don’t see why traffic can’t be streamlined to allow faster access to iPlayer, YouTube, Newgrounds, Facebook, MySpace, Last FM and all the other popular sites.