BBC iPlayer To Blame (Quote Heavy)

For all of you who have been using the BBC's iPlayer to download the shows you have missed, you might want to think again about using it, it's destroying your internet speeds.

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BBC’s iPlayer nukes “all you can eat” ISP business model

The UK’s largest broadcaster finally launched its online video streaming and download service on Christmas Day. Plusnet, a small ISP owned by BT, has provided a preliminary analysis of the traffic and the results should send shivers down the spine of any ISP currently offering an unlimited “all-you-eat” service.

The iPlayer service is basically a 7-day catch-up service which enables people who missed and didn’t record a broadcast to watch the programme at their leisure on a PC connected to the internet. The iPlayer differs from any other internet-based video service in certain key respects:

• It is funded by the £135.50 annual licence fee which pays for the majority of BBC activities. The BBC collected 25.1m licence fees in 2006/7. No advertising is required for the iPlayer business model to work.
• It is heavily promoted on the BBC broadcast TV channels. The BBC had a 42.6% share of overall UK viewing in 2006/7 and therefore a lot of people already know about the existence of the iPlayer after one month of launch.
• It is a high quality service and is designed for watching whole programmes rather than consumption of small vignettes. This is sharp contrast to the current #1 streaming site, YouTube.

Time to buy more pipes

We tested the bandwidth profile using Wireshark watching a 59mins documentary celebrating the 50 year anniversary of Sputnik with both streaming and P2P. The streaming traffic is easy to analyse as it comes through on port 1935, which is the port used by Flash for streaming. Basically a jitter-free screening ran on average at around 0.5Mbit/sec. Using the 155-meg ordering slice this means only around 300 people need to be watching the iPlayer at the same time (peak = 8pm-10pm) to fill a pipe.

Seeing that IPstream customers are aggregated across the UK to a single point, a lot of ISPs will be thinking of the need to order extra capacity. The BBC also offers a P2P download which is of higher quality than the streaming. We managed to download the 500Mb file in just over 20 minutes at an average speed of 3.5Mbit/sec. The total traffic (including overhead) for the streaming was 231MB and for the P2P delivery was 544Mb.

Full unbundling still leaves ISPs at the mercy of backhaul costs

The story for facility-based LLU players, which account for another 3.7m UK broadband customers, is slightly different as it depends completely on network design and distribution of the base across the exchanges. Telco 2.0 market intelligence says that some unbundlers have ordered 1-gig links for the backhaul and should be unaffected least in the short term. However, some unbundlers have only ordered 100-meg links and could be in deep trouble with peak hour people really noticing the difference in experience. The only real option for these unbundlers is to order extra capacity on their backhaul links which could be extremely expensive. The average speed for someone just browsing and doing emails is quite low compared to someone sat back watching videos stream.

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But maybe it's time that we went to Virgin Media:

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Cable companies understand sending telly over wires

The story for Virgin Media, which is the main UK cable operator with 3.3m broadband subscribers, is again is dependent on network design. This time it depends upon the load on the UBR within the network segment. Virgin Media have a special angle to this as the iPlayer will be coming to their Video-on-Demand service in the spring, and therefore we assume this will take a lot of load off their IP network. The Virgin VoD service runs on dedicated bandwidth within their network and allows for the content to be watched on TV rather than PC. A big bonus for the Virgin Media subscribers.

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Source

So should there be a seperate network for video streaming or a seperate network for web browsing?

Other sources:

InfoWorld

Bit-Tech

I've put it on Digg here But it wont let me edit my first post.

Woo! I didn't understand much of that! All I know is that Virgin upgraded my 2MBit to 10Mbit BB so w00t to them! I never use iPlayer anyway.

I had my Tiscali upgraded from 2Mbps to 8Mbps but my actual speed went from 2.2Mbps to a pathetic 1.7Mbps

Glad PlusNet just gave me an extra 9GB usage for free :). Complaining ftw.

I got a router from plusnet by a bit of complaining.

Bah thats why im on 24mb LLU and 2.5mb up so I dont have any problems ^&^

They should know what there paying £20 a month for and if they dont well thats there stupidity at work not BBC iplayers.