ISP bandwidth and video streaming
Video on the internet is starting to clog the web and slow it down and massive infrastructure changes are needed just to keep up with the big demand there is for video streaming. The problem is – Who Pays for the video streaming ? The privatised, disaggregated, and hierarchical nature of the internet makes it difficult to work this out, in the UK BT is the only Tier 2 provider, but there are then a multitude of tier 3 and 4 providers who also cross-sell connections upwards from their own networks. In the UK the overnight success of the BBC’s Iplayer has proved problematic for UK ISP’s who are finding their networks short of capacity and they are trying to get the BBC to pay for the infrastructure investment. The success of the BBC with their iplayer peer-to-peer system is going to damage the enduser, who will likely be capped on their usage and finish up paying for all that extra bandwidth - an indirect extension of the license fee.