The political side has changed a lot the LFFN £200m funding to date is being used by bids from distinctly urban areas and councils looking to reduce their connectivity costs while also increasing connectivity between premises.

In short most subsidies on LFFN will get spent on council anchor tenant stuff, and local business may get a side effect as in lower than existing Ethernet pricing.

Funding in rural areas is pretty much now the gainshare elements in England, Scotland is very different with large subsidy available for next phase, and Wales has more but a lot less per property.

Edited by MrSaffron (Sat 10-Feb-18 12:40:09)

The normal way is for high traffic things like this to be identified and a mutual peering arrangement arrived at, i.e. reduces transit costs while also improving service for customers. The US difference is the pay us and we will peer otherwise traffic is routed over our cheap transit option that has lots of congestion, customers aren't going to go elsewhere since they have no other option.

Imagine if BT ran half the UK, and Virgin Media the other half and that is much more the US situation.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

... but a lot less per premise.

Bah!

The typo you love to hate is fixed

Thanks .

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

we have the likes of comcast holding content providers like Netflix to ransom under the guise "we have the customers you need to reach, we will congest your traffic to hell and back unless you pay us XXX amount of money to peer with us".

But is that so unreasonable given the amount of capacity streaming services require?

Yup. They are already being paid for that capacity by their end users, and it's no coincidence that most of those doing it offer their own TV services. Nothing to do with protecting their network capacity at all, they want to compensate for loss of TV revenue to OTT providers.

The UK and Europe seem to manage okay but, then, we do a whole bunch of settlement free peering via both public and private connections and tend to have plenty of competition at the retail level so any operator playing games with their transit and peering will take a hammering.

That said, the odd ISP has extorted Netflix or A N Other in Europe. I fully imagine Liberty Global will do so once they've finished moving Virgin Media fully behind their Aorta network.

Indeed, the end user of the broadband should be paying for bandwidth rather than the content provider. If not then I think Google should be paying a fortune to all ISPs as I suspect a large chunk of the traffic flowing over them is Google in some shape or form (search, maps, email, youtube, etc, etc). Content providers don't generate any traffic - it is the consumer that generates the traffic by consuming their content.

yes, as comcast customers already pay comcast to use that bandwidth.

Its a bit like me paying for bandwidth from heztner for my server, and then having to pay sky on top of that for users of sky to download from my server.

exactly if someone like BT tried it here, then customers would simply leave en masse to another isp, comcast have the luxury of not having that problem.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Indeed, the end user of the broadband should be paying for bandwidth rather than the content provider. If not then I think Google should be paying a fortune to all ISPs as I suspect a large chunk of the traffic flowing over them is Google in some shape or form (search, maps, email, youtube, etc, etc). Content providers don't generate any traffic - it is the consumer that generates the traffic by consuming their content.

YouTube and Netflix combined are in the ballpark of half of all downstream traffic in the United States.

Here I'm pretty sure you take those two and add BBC iPlayer you're not going to be far off.

As you noted none of this is being sent unsolicited. The ISPs' customers request this content, they pay for access to this content and should receive it to the best ability the ISPs can provide it.