Anyone who’s had broadband for a while now may well have noticed that everything seems to be slowing down. When broadband was all shiny and new, all of us who’d previously endured a much slower connections were gasping in disbelief as MP3’s were delivered straight to their hard drives in seconds. Now it’s a different story - connections frequently suffer from congestion; that single we’ve been waiting to get our hands on takes a couple of minutes to download where before it was a matter of seconds, and at times it feels as though we’ve regressed to the bad old days of dial-up.
As take-up of broadband services increases, internet traffic in Britain has risen accordingly, with music downloads, illegal or otherwise, and the BBC iPlayer listed as the main culprits.
Almost one million programmes are watched per day on the BBC’s flagship catch-up service and the ISPs can’t cope, leading to speculation that the BBC did not anticipate the popularity of it’s wonder platform. Under investment in next-gen networks has also been cited as a cheif cause of congestion.
Under discussion at the government’s advisory committee for broadband, headed up by Baroness Shriti Vadera and former Ofcom boss Stephen Carter, is the long-mooted prospect of unrolling fibre-optic cable connections for every home (FTTH).
However, this would be cripplingly expensive, costing up to £10 billion to connect every home, or £5 billion to connect every telephone exchange. Smaller, cash-strapped ISPs are reluctant to foot the bill and BT, having seen their existing network subjected to a regulatory carve-up has already expressed that it wont pony up without government incentive.
Who will actually pay for installation remains unclear, but two possible scenarios are emerging. In the first, as the BBC is generating more and more traffic, but cannot to pay for fibre-optic cables as per the PSB licence agreement (it can’t charge viewers for something they’ve already paid for). Broadband providers struggle to raise the revenue needed, which gives the government a good excuse to ask for a licence fee increase.
The second scenario could be initiated by the music industry - big players such as Universal and Sony BMG could make entire back catalogues available online for an extra monthly fee, say £5 a month, on top of regular broadband services. Deals struck between content owners such as Warner Bros. and UK ISPs such as Tiscali and O2 for IPTV content provision are already in place, so these deals could feasibly be expanded to include music downloads.
The additional revenue is then invested in improvements to speed and connectivity. However, it is unclear whether consumers would opt for this, especially if the BBC release all the Radio 1 session archives for free. Whatever the future holds, one thing is clear – as more and more of us Brits take advantage of interactive services and downloads, bandwidth is eaten up and a solution must be found if there is to be any growth in online business in the UK.
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