BT Throttling Users

No, not strangling them, just reducing their download speeds. Today’s article on the BBC site:

BT Broadband cuts the speed users can watch video services like the BBC iPlayer and YouTube at peak times.  A customer who has signed on to an up to 8 megabit per second (MBPS) package can have speed cut to below 1Mbps. A BT spokesman said the firm managed bandwidth “in order to optimise the experience for all customers”.

Of course, this is very irksome to the BBC, who rely on broadband for users to access their iPlayer catch-up TV service. Traditional ISP networks are build around age old contention ratios and burst rates. Typically users access a web page (a burst of download bandwidth), then read it (which averages the bandwidth back down over time). Giving someone 8MBps for 1 minute out of every 10 is very different than 8MBps for 10 minutes.

iPlayer, more than any other, has changed network demand models. Youtube has too, but less so - average clip lengths on the service are much shorter than watching an hour long TV program.

Ultimately someone is going to have to pay for the extra network costs of the new usage patterns, or the ISPs will have to limit average bandwidths to avoid expensive network upgrades. This is going to add a whole new dimension to the argument over how broadband speeds are advertised. Let the arguments commence…