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Is the internet doomed?

Posted on 11 Mar 2008 at 17:21

In the meantime, there's more life to be wrung from the copper we use today. The problem, as with the backbone players, isn't how much bandwidth is available but who should pay for it, and increasingly British ISPs are struggling to provide an adequate service.

Perhaps the biggest bandwidth threat facing UK consumers comes not from the copper or the internet core, but from our ISPs and the way they deal with the "middle mile". For example, while ISPs and BT may talk about contention ratios of 50:1 over BT's ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) network, it isn't that simple, and insiders say over-contention is rife in the UK consumer market, which is why many ISPs no longer publish contention ratios.

"They might contend at 50:1 at the ATM level, but then contend again on the backhaul, so you might have 100 or 200 users contending a service and the consumer really has no way of knowing," claims Kurt-Elli. "Some ISP contention ratios are just embarrassing. Backhaul pipe is expensive - around £350,000 a year for a 155Mb/sec pipe - and if ISPs want to control costs they can squeeze more customers onto that pipe, but the service will deteriorate."

And the problem is set to worsen as more strain is placed on those backhauls, especially with the imminent launch of ADSL2+ connections promised by improvements in BT's network. "Suddenly all the backhaul problems that exist on 8Mb/sec connections are multiplied and people are getting angry that they aren't getting even what should be available," says Kurt-Elli. "And it's the ISPs' fault because they haven't bought enough of the pipe, but it's pretty much impossible for a consumer to know that."

Consumer concerns

However, the most important question is how will this affect our connections? Even the Nemertes Research report doesn't suggest total internet meltdown, but the level of traffic will mean consumers "increasingly find themselves encountering internet brownouts or snow days, during which performance will (seemingly inexplicably) degrade".

Anyone who uses P2P software will already be aware that ISPs routinely throttle bandwidth to thwart heavy downloaders, and the practice means more bandwidth for everyone else. But, according to Cisco, there's going to be a change in perception among end users, who have in the most part been unsympathetic to peer-to-peer addicts.

"P2P hogs haven't elicited much sympathy from the general public and so the service providers have been able to institute usage caps without too much outcry," a company spokesperson claims. "However, a household downloading just three hours of high-definition content a week would generate at least 27GB a month, which would already exceed the bandwidth caps of many."

You can't treat someone downloading legal videos of Top Gear from the Beeb's new iPlayer in the same way as copyright cheats routinely downloading movies that haven't even reached the local cinema yet. But we've all felt the pinch of this net slowdown already, and the clampdown looks set to continue. Virgin Media recently upset customers by throttling users that downloaded too much during peak hours, and traffic management is now routine among ISPs. "We prioritise time-sensitive interactive applications like gaming, VoIP and web browsing so that at busy times your experience is always good, but that means file sharing and downloading has a lower priority at peak times," says Neil Armstrong, CEO of PlusNet.

"What ISPs really need to do is get customers used to the idea that the more bandwidth they use, the more they are going to have to pay. Things like the iPlayer are really interesting, because they're mainstream and could make a massive difference. We had a new subscriber with his first connection and he used up his monthly allowance in two days watching badgers on Autumn Watch with Bill Oddie - that's not a problem we had even a year ago."