![]() Note how the BBC has lots of direct connections (peers), rather than going via a few intermediaries. Here’s a RIPE BGPlay visualisation of the BBC’s routing table just before the Olympic games. Further, once you’ve spent the money to run the cables, install the gear, and turn on the Ethernet port on the IX switch, you can be certain of the costs over the time it takes you to amortise them. If you’re connecting up with the BBC at LINX, for example, you’re almost certainly using your own equipment, so although it still costs you money, the connectivity is provided at cost. Secondly, the BBC encouraged direct peering between its own content network and UK eyeball ISPs, which like all peering tended to replace OPEX with CAPEX amortisation. Specifically, they contracted with Akamai Networks to outload their video content from their servers in ISP network operations centres. But compared to what is now being suggested, the BBC’s Internetworking policy under Ashley Highfield was relatively friendly.įirst of all, the BBC made extensive use of content delivery networks (CDNs) to soften the blow, by caching the data nearer to users. The BBC has been criticised on this blog for an attitude to the ISP business model crisis you could characterise as neo-brutalist: we’re here with our vast video stockpile, like a massive concrete tower, and you’ll just have to deal with it. ![]() Ma Bell grew up on the back of AT&T’s leverage over smaller local telcos when it came to interconnect with the long distance network. Since receiving money is good, and paying out isn’t, this is core to the business model. Peered networks mean no money changes hands between telcos otherwise you have to pay or receive money for transit. So what drives the economics of online video delivery? Īs so often, economic change on the Internet is manifesting itself as a peering war, or something like one. In the meantime, we can watch the old industry structures strain and buckle. The answer will inevitably be a new more dynamic market for bandwidth and content delivery. And the pattern is likely to repeat itself all over the world, since you have a misalignment of interests between media players (who want free or cheap online distribution), and ISPs (who want to sell ‘unlimited’ plans to users in the hope they never use any of the capacity sold). Now, it looks like a second wave of iPlayer-related disruption is heading for the British DSL providers’ bottom line. We also noted that even if the Beeb is sucking up a lot of bandwidth, it’s still not as big a deal as YouTube. We documented, with a little help from Plusnet and their happy wurlitzer Ellacoyas, just how heavily the BBC’s iPlayer TV streaming service hit British ISPs. But the summer calm was shattered this week by some news - and, despite what you’d read elsewhere, it wasn’t the Ericsson/STMicro merger. ![]() It’s August not much going on in the telcosphere.
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