Throttling

Hi all

I am a freelance journalist writing a piece for a mainstream consumer magazine looking at how ISPs throttle bandwidth during peak times, and how this impacts subscribers.

I'm looking for people who have been throttled and had problems using consumer services such as iPlayer as a result. If you'd be happy to talk about your experiences with any ISP, please get in touch.

Thanks in advance and I look forward to hearing from you,

Stewart Mitchell

will you be explaining contention and covering the impact of congestion, which may be what people see in some cases rather than targeted intentional throttling ?

As a starter for 10, assume that a retail broadband connection is supplied with 35 kbits/s of capacity per user at the tightest point in the network. Then consider what proportion of the customers could get (say) 700 kbits/s to stream the iPlayer.
Answer - 1 in 20, and only if the other 19 aren't using their connection.

That's how the monthly cost is kept low, before you go off on a "we're being ripped off" tangent. It would be good to see a comprehensive and educational treatment of the topic.

Edited by yarwell (Tue 07-Jul-09 12:20:14)

In reply to a post by yarwell:

That's how the monthly cost is kept low, before you go off on a "we're being ripped off" tangent. It would be good to see a comprehensive and educational treatment of the topic.

Seconded. Drawing an analogy to the road network might be useful. Given enough money and planning permission we could eliminate all congestion.

For a while anyway which is actually also an argument applicable to computer networks

To be clear though - I think such articles should be encouraged. I think that educating people about how broadband works and what it costs would do a lot to resolve the current impasse. If it becomes common knowledge that bandwidth isn't free, significant investment is needed and most important the less you pay the less you get perhaps next gen broadband would have a decent RoI.

Edited by Andrue (Tue 07-Jul-09 11:27:18)

I will be talking about contention, and the need to share bandwidth to give everyone a fair crack. The difference seems to be that whereas previously it was heavy P2P and BT users that were the targets of throttling, there are more mainstream users of things like iPlayer and other video sites that are being caught up in it. These people are generally less clued up than serious downloaders.

It's not a question of being ripped off, but if you have signed up for a service, at least partly to use it for watching video online, and cannot do that because the ISP is restricting your access then there is a real consumer issue. It may be that the piece recommends using a more expensive service that invests more in infrastructure to avoid the problem.

bandwidth demand is certainly increasing and as you say once the P2P merchants are nailed down the video streamers may become the demand that is filling up the capacity.

Streaming, or at least things Plusnet label as streaming, don't seem too dominant at http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/broa...

How do you differentiate between "because the ISP is restricting your access" and "demand exceeding supply" ? Is your focus on those using targeted throttling, or is congestion also being called throttling ?

The focus is really on ISPs that are using targeted throttling, and what that actually means to end users. I don't think it is fundamentally wrong, as long a people understand what they are getting before they sign up to a lengthy contract.

In reply to a post by sgmitchell:

The focus is really on ISPs that are using targeted throttling

thx for the clarification.

In reply to a post by sgmitchell:

The focus is really on ISPs that are using targeted throttling, and what that actually means to end users.

Ah, right.

I don't think it is fundamentally wrong, as long a people understand what they are getting before they sign up to a lengthy contract.

Agreed on that - although it's notoriously difficult to get people to read and understand even when you make it clear. There seems to be a natural optimism involved when signing up for broadband that causes people to always assume the best.

Look at 'up to 8Mb'. It's not difficult to understand and all ISPs explain it but so many people apparently don't understand and complain when their isolatd farmhouse only gets 1Mb.

Edited by Andrue (Tue 07-Jul-09 13:06:04)

In reply to a post by yarwell:

Streaming, or at least things Plusnet label as streaming, don't seem too dominant at http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/broa...

iPlayer traffic is HTTP-based and doesn't use what most traffic managers would be able to collar as "Streaming" (likely RTSP feeds) - consider that many ISP's will pick it up as HTTP and will only really be able to identify it via other means.

In reply to a post by zaprobo:

In reply to a post by yarwell:

Streaming, or at least things Plusnet label as streaming, don't seem too dominant at http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/broa...

iPlayer traffic is HTTP-based and doesn't use what most traffic managers would be able to collar as "Streaming" (likely RTSP feeds) - consider that many ISP's will pick it up as HTTP and will only really be able to identify it via other means.

HTTP protocol is only used for downloaded version of iplayer programming the online streams use RTMP from a couple of servers, one being 90.223.246.70 most content is delivered through port 80 though