ISP Wars

No, this is not a title of a new game but mearly a post on the current trend in ISP (Internet Service Providers). Originally the war was over pricing, now it's over who's got the higher "Cap" limit.

Broadband was pushed in the UK to deal with legislation that had been forced to get the British public "Wired up", since Britain is notorious for being expensive and originally there were concerns of one of the major UK companies BT (British Telecom) almost running a monopoly by not allowing third parties to use their telephone networks.

However that all changed, Third-Parties are now "Reselling" BT Bandwidth, however the phone giant still maintains an essence of control being the owner of a majority of the phone cables in the country.

This means if BT decides to place "Caps" or Limitations on the amount of bandwidth a connection can have, all those resellers have to follow suit otherwise they would be operating at a loss.

"Caps" could be seen as a method of "overcharging us Brits once again", however it could also be seen as no longer increasing the connectivity by enforcing ergonomic use of contention on the already available network or limiting those that participate within P2P share-networking.

[Contention is the "networks" bandwidth, as in how many other people share that network hub with you. Namely you'll find connections easier and higher speed the less people their are in the network, as apposed to the reverse. so a contention of 1:2, 1:15 is far better than 1:25 , 1:50]

Surely a number of people that have signed up to bi-annual and annual DSL packages with their ISP are now feeling the force of their bandwidth limit, as for instance a 15GB per Month transfer limit would allow a user to download a file thats about 1CD in size every 2 days (Actual figure was 492,813kb per day, however that's in reality is about 164,271kb Upload and 328,542kb download if a person was using a share-network)

So check your ISP bills to find out if you are being hammered for extra bandwidth usage.

 

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yeah, i think BT are bastards as well

 

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Another BBC report mentions the increase of broadband and notibly why I suggested the current "Cap" limitations are bad.

"But it is not just a question of making broadband faster

Cheap net calls and video-on-demand are just two services that will make broadband a must-have in homes."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3697892.stm

Namely current caps are set to slow down the potential for the generation of pioneering technologies, like true Web TV (Not the actual television version), Virtual Reality and of course Video Phone Conferencing.

All those technologies would require streaming data for the duration of a call, and depending on the quality of the data and the compression would decide how much bandwidth would be needed. The caps would be used up in no time.

 

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It all comes down to hardware. To provide the users with a given bandwidth, sufficient cables and transmission gear must be installed and maintained. This costs money, lots of money. Somebody has to pay, so why not the users? CAP is one way to figure out who pays how much. There are others, of course, and some might be better than others, but you must realize that in one way or another, there is a bill to be paid. It would sure be nice to have streaming unlimited broad-band in every home, and if the present trend continues, we'll have it within a decade or so, but... it is not for free.

Hans