Just how sustainable is this?
No, it’s not a green or environmental post. It’s a techie post. I’ve been exchanging tweets recently with my ISP over their record bandwidth usage lately. The cause of these records? Tennis. Well, indirectly, tennis. In actual fact, BBC iPlayer. The Murray quarter final match yesterday afternoon accounted for a massize 25% of Plusnet’s bandwidth at something like 1.8Gb/s. It’s probably a good job they brought another 155Mb pipe on recently.
There’s a lot of discussion going off in the press at the moment about who should pay. Some advocate pushing charges back to the content provider, but they’re arguing that they’ve paid their whack in getting their server farm connected to the Internet in the first place with the necessary high capacity pipes.
As we look more to Internet delivered services, this argument is going to rumble on and on and users like thee ‘n’ me are going to want to make sure we’re using an ISP that can make the necessary investments in bandwidth to ensure consistent delivery of service. The situation is only going to get worse. Virgin will sell you a 50Mb fibre connection to home. Plusnet and others are trialling or have already rolled out ADSL2+ with up to 20Mb on copper.
Is, therefore, the current charging model the right one moving forward? Commentators more skilled than me will probably be having that argument for years to come. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up with TopGear from the weekend tonight on iPlayer and I hope there’s no tennis on to pinch the bandwidth!







