Virgin Attacks Net Neutrality

QUOTE

Virgin Media say pay us for faster content streaming
By Claudine Beaumont, Digital Channel Editor
Pay us and we'll stream your content faster, Virgin Media boss tells content providers

The chief executive of the UK's second biggest broadband internet service provider has hinted that his company would consider fast-tracking the delivery of content from certain providers and services across the web in exchange for a fee.

Neil Berkett, the new chief exectutive of Virgin Media, dismissed the concept of 'net neutrality' - the idea that internet providers should deliver all content across the internet at equal speeds, regardless of content type - as "a load of bollocks".
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He said that Virgin Media, which has around 3.5 million customers in the UK, was in talks with several content providers , including online gaming companies, about plans to introduce a fee-based system, whereby they can pay to have their content delivered faster over the internet.

His comments, made in a recent interview with the Royal Television Society's Television magazine, come at a difficult time for the internet industry. Internet television catch-up services, such as the BBC iPlayer, are reportedly placing a strain on the broadband network, slowing down overall network speeds because of high demand for the bandwidth-hungry service.

Many service providers believe the companies responsible for such content should pay them a fee to offset the cost of buying more capacity to carry the data across the web. They argue that just as companies such as the BBC have to pay to broadcast their content across the television network, a similar deal should apply online.

Berkett also warned that public service broadcasters that decided not to pay for faster access to Virgin's subscribers could end up in "bus lanes", with their content delivered to subscribers at slower speeds.

In theory, it also means that file-sharing services, legal or otherwise, will probably be pushed to the bottom of the traffic priority list, as could services such as video-sharing site YouTube and the photo-sharing service Flickr, which both involve uploading large files across the web.

The practice of regulating the speed and flow of traffic - known as "traffic shaping" - is widely used by internet service providers, especially at peak times , to manage capacity.

Web surfers are now using the BBC's iPlayer to watch around 600,000 shows per day, with more than 42 million programmes viewed so far this year. The iPlayer's traffic is increasing by 25 per cent each month, and it was recently made available on Apple's iPhone and Nintendo's Wii games console.

Ashley Highfield, the BBC's former director of future media and technology, recently defended the Corporation's position in an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, arguing that services such as the iPlayer had a positive impact on the broadband network, increasingd users' demand for higher speed broadband connections and better quality of services, and helping "all boats rise on the success of BBC iPlayer".

"The BBC does pay to create, encode, host, and distribute its programmes into the broadband network, but we should not have to subsidise the ISPs' infrastructure upgrades," he said. "I don't think any content providers should pay ISPs to deliver their content: users would, I strongly believe, react very negatively to a situation in which certain video content was throttled or downgraded or even not made available because that content provider had not paid a levy to a particular ISP."

http://www.telegraph...dlvirgin114.xml

Shame, I was tempted to go with Virgin Broadband because of their fast broadband speed. |h well, they'll have to do with a gigantic "FUCK YOU" instead.

Fuck big content and control of the culture industry. Here in the States, we already pay what appears to be a minimum of 30$ a month for SHITTY broadband internet access. Providers list their top speeds, but because they did not design their architecture to support full bandwidth all the time, they just limit people under the hood instead of offering superior products because the infrastructure is not designed for full bandwidth all the time for everybody. And now we'll have to pay extra, just to make sure that we aren't ALWAYS getting the shaft in terms of Internet speed (because let's be honest, they're not going to make anything actually faster if they can get away with it)? Destroying net neutrality gives the wealthy control of the entire system, meaning the little guy's web page (and apparently also YouTube) will take a few years to load because he's not fellating his ISP enough. Which is a corporate pig's dream come true, of course, because that means they can use their money to make sure that their endless increase of profits can continue unhindered.

This post has been edited by Slade: 15 April 2008 - 08:28 AM