The IP Development Network Blog

Suddenly everyone is a power user. I bet you didn't see that coming...

Wakey Wakey!
The iPlayer is a wake up call because we can all now see the beginnings of the final product. ISPs have known about it for years - the market estimates have been openly shared - but perhaps because the development process and consultation took 4 years, they might have forgotten that this day would someday come. Now the product is out there - with a prized place on the BBC's web site - all those light users that made the economics work (just) are suddenly potential power users too.

The BBC's online media organisation is formidable and is a mass market proposition. bbc.co.uk is the 5th most popular UK site according to Hitwise - most of us have sampled online video and radio from them already. Streaming clips validated the concept of online video, but the iPlayer brings the promise of what has been lacking so far - stuff that lots of people want to sit back and watch. Only the networks - with their threats of throttling and extra charges - stand in the way of mass market adoption.

They Got Themselves Into This Mess
It is hard to feel sympathy: we all know that ISPs have made decisions that have put them where they are today as they fought their way through the land grab over the last few years. The result is a market where customers think they are buying one thing, while their suppliers are delivering something different. What does " unlimited " mean to you? What does " unlimited* " mean to you?

The asterisk is vital as we all know, but even if you read the Terms & Conditions to find the Fair Use Policy (FUP), you are unlikely to be left with the impression that it is going affect you. The policies talk of using P2P and filesharing applications like they are some sort of nasty disease that you are very unlikely to catch. Some ISPs were up front about it - capped products were launched - but they really weren't very popular. Because they were trying to grow numbers in an expanding market, there remained the option to go unlimited* for just a little bit more money each month. And for a while, the model worked, especially when the market price hit the magic £17 per month tipping point.

Problem, What Problem?
Power users were simply not a problem for most ISPs because they became such a small corner of the base. As prices fell, adoption rates soared and ever lighter users were added to the network reducing average usage and actually making the price cuts work financially.

The trick with fixed price models is to set the price at a point where even light usage customers choose it anyway because it gives them certainty in their monthly bill for a reasonable price. The "under-utilisation" of your new customers actually makes average usage fall which reduces cost per customer. Set the fixed price too high and you only get the power users for whom the service is still cheap. Set it too low and you know what happens...

But the chickens are coming home to roost. The market is saturating and the inevitable has happened: light users now have the urge to use video filesharing applications too. Only we're not talking about mininova or some diseased video pirates now, it's the iPlayer from that bastion of British media, the BBC.

P2P: The Disruptive Force
Has the BBC caught the disease too, or are the ISPs wrong to treat filesharing as a parasite? It was certainly easier when P2P meant bootleg content. Then, service providers probably held the moral high ground even perhaps protecting the interests of media organisations in a strange sort of way.

Now though, mainstream media is using P2P technology because it delivers them a lower cost for their distribution. P2P was necessary in the piracy world because viewers were not paying customers and a way had to be to offload the cost. The solution was brilliant - use the spare CPU, RAM, Disk and Bandwidth of all users to remove the need for central servers that would a) be traceable and b) cost money. Is this a necessary move from big businesses or is it predatory?

Big media have turned the poacher into the gamekeeper. Of course P2P saves them money but it also helps their DRM by fragmenting the file into disparate pieces on its journey across the internet. The technology works in their interests but it does so at the expense of the ISPs. I'll save writing about the black arts of P2P economics for another day, but suffice to say, P2P generates a lot of extra upstream traffic and disaggregates traffic flows making them very difficult to manage (ie. it costs more). There are solutions, but that too is another article.

If big media was paying their share of distribution costs then perhaps the ISPs concerns would have a hollow tone. This is just not how the internet works: the BBC grant free peering much in the same way as peasants receive an invitation to one of the Queen's Garden Parties, something that is inconceivable in reverse. The fact is that users want this content out there and they don't care who their ISP is as long as long as the connection is free(ish). The ISPs are over a barrel.

What is Really Happening Now?
But lets take a reality check and look at traffic across the LINX peering point where the iPlayer's impact on network bandwidth is likely be seen first. Although traffic is up this week, it has almost certainly been due to wind and rain rather than diseases running wild over the network.

It certainly sounds like the apocalypse may be coming but in fact there is no real evidence of any iPlayer growth in demand although you would not expect to see growth in August. There may be signs that the seasonal lull may not be as obvious as in past years, but that could just be the terrible weather this summer. It will be interesting to keep an eye on these graphs in the autumn when the days get shorter.

Supply is NOT Infinite!
Before dismissing the problem, look at the year on year picture at LINX. Peak traffic loads are close to double what they were a year ago so while connection numbers are only increasing by 15% on an annualised basis. 115% of customers have used 200% the bandwidth used a year ago, indicating that usage per user even before the iPlayer may be going up by as much as 75% every year.

Has your broadband bill gone up by 75% in the last year? Probably not... you have an unlimited* product. Maybe though the * is getting bigger and more ominous? Am I going to get punished for watching the Beeb?

If you feel like this you are not alone - it's going to be an issue for everyone very soon. Looking at some estimates of the bandwidth impact, you can see the iPlayer itself - one application - being responsible for as much traffic in 2010 as is carried from every other source put together now. Total traffic will grow tenfold if ITV, Sky and the others follow suit.

It has amused me to see the rekindling of the network neutrality "debate" in response to the iPlayer launch. Network Neutrality is not a debate, it is a faith and the debate is no more constructive than arguing with someone about their religion. I agree with Martin Geddes - he's my god on this issue.

No, the problem is not that ISPs want extra money for carrying this traffic just to increase their bottom lines - although they would of course take it if they could. The problem is that most of them still haven't paid back the last loans that took them into broadband and are going to have to find more money from customers with unlimited* usage to pay the £831m iPlayer bill.

We Could All See it Coming
Someone asked me once if I had £6m would I put it into their LLU project. Only if I had £60m in the bank I said, because it was clear a long time back that investment was a recurring theme of the broadband business model. That was before a public body came along and wanted to double the load on the networks and them with the bill. My father researched black holes for a living in his career as an astronomer. I often feel like I am doing the same thing when I look at telecoms economics.

ISPs knew what was coming in the iPlayer. Perhaps they didn't believe it possible that the BBC would get this far. Perhaps they took their eye off the ball in the price war deathmatch? You don't want to worry your customers unnecessarily - especially when you are in land-grab mode - but more should have been done by the big players to clarify exactly what they mean by unlimited* before the problem arose. Maybe that is what is happening now?

Even now though there are gains to be made and there is a game being played out. Tiscali are playing chief bad-guy, perhaps because if TalkTalk had tried taking on that role, Dunstone would have been given the Graham Taylor treatment. Others are staying out of it knowing that they haven't dug themselves in quite as deeply and may be able to profit from the negative PR that the two fighting the case will surely receive.

In spite of the fact that the problem that the industry has caused itself has become so apparent*, they are still looking for ways to get one up on each other. That's competition and it shows that the market is working as it has been designed to.

But has it been designed well? Will ISPs find a way to make extra charges stick? If they do not, where is the money coming from to pay back the LLU bill, let alone the iPlayer bill? Will we see a further wave of Telco bankruptcies as yet another round of investment is written off and sold for pennies in the pound deepening the vicious circle of price decline and under-investment? If no money is made from LLU, who is going to lend the money to build fibre?

ISPs need to act as a cartel* on this, but then that is illegal... We're back to the natural monopoly issue again.

* subject to fair use policy. See Orange's as an example. Shockingly vague - I have captured it here for the historical record as I suspect this may have to change! Tiscali's is a little better, but it still tries to brush the problem aside "If you don't use Peer to Peer or file sharing software it is unlikely you will ever be affected by this Fair Usage Policy"

Labels: catch-up TV, iPlayer, ISP Products, Ofcom

# posted by Jeremy Penston @ 8/16/2007 06:16:00 PM

Thursday, 16 August 2007

Unlimited* Broadband