News Net neutrality needed in UK?

[Da Dego]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/08...needed_in_uk/1

As on-demand video services boom, UK ISPs threaten to tax the companies behind them. Is net neutrality becoming a problem here too?

[Ramble]

Yes. it's a pain up the arse to find a particular service slowed down just so the ISPs can make more money. It's not a cost thing, it's a wanting to screw us our of our money thing.

[naokaji]

i pay for my broadband the full price they want...

so i demand that they let me make full use of it and dont go threaten me or companys that we shouldnt use so much bandwith.

[firefly]

Originally Posted by naokaji

i pay for my broadband the full price they want...

so i demand that they let me make full use of it and dont go threaten me or companys that we shouldnt use so much bandwith.

QFT!!!!!!!

[Delphium]

Likewise I already pay over the odds for the service I recieve and not being a peer2peer, youtube, joost, or bbc iplayer user than ill be rather pissed if they start charging extra for it.

As naokaji quite rightly says, I/we pay in full for the service, I expect to use the service to its full!

[skpstr]

Unfortunately it seems that nobody really pays for a full service, you pay for a service that is provided under the control of some sort of "Fair Use Policy"

These seem to be very vague pieces of text which allow the ISP to do what the hell they like.

[phat-ant]

hehe true enough. I have been a business user for many years so I'm used to paying over the odds but I do hope that they don't actually get away with this charging the bigger sites. As a web developer I certainly wouldn't want to have to pay a ISP tax for offering my web services, especially as there are so many ISP's out there it would be chaos with every company trying to grab a piece of the pie.

[Jamie]

If Europeans can get 100mbit, for less than we can get 8mbit what is the point of being part of the EU?

[naokaji]

Originally Posted by Jamie

If Europeans can get 100mbit, for less than we can get 8mbit what is the point of being part of the EU?

switzerland is not in the eu and all private people can get is 15mb....

[DougEdey]

To answer the question, yes we need net neutrality.

[Mother-Goose]

it would be ******* tiscali as well!! *******

[Jamie]

Soon we'll be having to 'offset' our downloads because it's not green and produces too much carbon.

[sgr55]

Yes. it's a pain up the arse to find a particular service slowed down just so the ISPs can make more money. It's not a cost thing, it's a wanting to screw us our of our money thing.

This isn't the whole truth.

ISP's using BT's network are paying £96,883 per 622mbit central per month.

Say a customer is paying £25 a month.

Port Cost per customer (BT Charge to the ISP): £8.40
Equipment / Building / Staff / Profit and Other costs: £5.00
£25 - £13.4 = £11.60 (which can go towards the central costs).
Now, a 622mbit central costs £96,883 per month to the ISP.
£96,883 / £11.60 = 8352 Customers needed just to pay for 1 central.
Divide 622 by 8352 Customers and you get 0.07Mbit capacity per customer.

0.0744 megabits = 76.1856 kilobits
76.18 / 8 = 9.5KB/s

Thats approx 23GB per month per customer thats been budgeted. (Alot less for a £14 per month package)
Hold on a minute... Doesnt the fair usage policy say 50GB or more?

In reality though, ISP's can/will have anywhere up to 32,000 customers per central. The economics have changed and they've been caught with their pants down.
a) they can't offer the products they currently sell without making a substantial loss per customer, assuming the customer uses the product as advertised.
b) they can't maintain their current profit levels even if they sell what is budgeted for.

The only way to fix the problem is to offer what is budgeted for. The only way this can happen is if all ISP's are forced to do this at the same time. Alot of custom would be lost if one ISP held off doing this for a few months to gain a few extra customers.

To sum up, Prices need to go up ( or come down at a wholesale level) AND ISP's need their asses kicked collectively. The latter I don't see happening anytime soon.
I've lost count on how many small / medium sized ISP's to be bought over or gone bust in the last 12 months. The figure is in the dozens.

Going to take a few years for the market to settle down and catch up with it's customer base.

[Bungle]

Hardly suprising TBH, the hardware costs for installing new fibre optic networks is a costly business How much!. Companies such as BT are going to be naturally cautious unless they can be convinced that the demand is there and people are willing to front the money to pay for these improved services. After what happened in the dot com boom and bust, I'm not surprised companies are slow on the uptake. We'll get there eventually but companies are gonna take small steps before trying to leap forward.

[C-Sniper]

we have this problem at our school. Our school doesn't want to invest in a bigger pipe and now we cant use the internet if we are in a certain class. But thankfully our IT guy at the school doesn't really care and we can do pretty much whatever we want when we want (minus things like porn,warez,etc)

[specofdust]

Originally Posted by Jamie

If Europeans can get 100mbit, for less than we can get 8mbit what is the point of being part of the EU?

Umm, what the hell? You think it's an EU responsibility to make sure you get leet broadband for cheap?

Jeez...if it's not one person complaining that brussels is being "handed" our sovereignty it's another expecting them to work miracles in areas that clearly have nothing to do with what a supra-national government does.

[xion]

Originally Posted by Mother-Gooser

it would be ******* tiscali as well!! *******

QFT

Really tiscali are poo... run away, hide, move house! I'm stuck with them for now, the account is in the name of my ex-flatmate who moved out 6 months ago... yet they cant change the billing details, i cant pay over the phone because my name's not on the account, yet they still send demands... I've been running in circles with their so called customer service. [/rant]

Anyhoo, services need to move with demand, if there was a package available at the right price point with low contention, truely unlimited, non-throttled, open connection i'd gladly take it, and pay more, i'm sure plenty of others are just sick of all the fine print "get out of jail" cards these isp's seem the cling to. (Yeah i know i happen to work for a very large 4play provider...)

[yodasarmpit]

Tiscali have a vested interest in slowing services such as iPlayer, seeing as they have signed a deal with Sky to offer on demand TV of their own.


Also as sqr55 stated, ISP's using the BT network have to pay per MB and if we use more it costs them more.

[DXR_13KE]

i really hate the small print.... or the no print for that matter.... or even that "we have the right to change all of the above when we want without having to tell you"

[esdubu]

So let me get this straight, they want a publicly funded body to subsidise internet usage due to the broadband boom these companies encouraged? If they didn't have the ability to provide the services they were advertising they should not have provided them in the first place!