OPINIO-TRON SAYS: iPlayer points to two-tier UK internet

It looks like the debate over net neutrality, which has been raging in the US for some time, is set to waft politely into the UK. For the uninitiated, the central question in this fracas is whether ISPs should be allowed to charge content producers for a ‘fast lane’ in today’s increasingly crowded internet.

The ideological answer from internet purists is an emphatic “no”. Giving priority to traffic from specific sources would, it is argued, create a two-tier experience, in which ordinary users are driven into the clutches of Big Media, at the expense of new players. This doesn’t sit well with the idea of the open, indiscriminate internet we have grown to love.

Perhaps inevitably though, such egalitarianism has stubbed its toe on the footstool of commercial practicality.

In the UK, this has taken the form of the BBC’s hugely popular iPlayer TV streaming service, which saw 1 million people downloading 3.5 million programmes in its first month. iPlayer has put a massive and sudden strain on the UK’s already decrepit broadband infrastructure, which industry regulator OFCOM predicts will cost in the region of £830 million to upgrade.

But competition is squeezing the ISPs’ profit margins and there is a growing resentment that they should have to carry the significant cost of transmitting content from a state-funded producer. Also, as consumers, we’ve grown used to broadband which offers ever higher speeds at ever decreasing cost.

All of which presents us with something of a pickle: the ISPs won’t (and arguably can’t) pay for iPlayer’s bandwidth requirements, while consumers are unlikely to tolerate a reverse in falling broadband costs.

That really only leaves one option: the Beeb. But why should the BBC – and, by extension, payers of the mandatory TV license fee – pay for bandwidth which could also be used by 4OD, YouTube, Joost and the organisation’s other potential competitors?

Senior figures at BT are already talking publicly about the creation of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in the UK, under which large pieces of high-demand content would be stored in (and distributed from) regional “nodes”, thereby limiting the strain on the country’s broadband backbone. Charging the BBC for space on a CDN seems like the obvious solution to their mutual problem: all the reserved bandwidth iPlayer demands, plus a much-needed new revenue stream for BT.

Which brings us back to net neutrality.

Our hunger for bandwidth is only going to get greater as more content moves online and into high definition. While the economics of content production may currently allow us to download TV for little or no cost, this is arguably being subsidised by spiralling overheads for the ISPs, which have become a de-facto distributor. It is hard to see how this can continue, but equally hard to envisage a solution in which the content producers don’t end up paying for preferential treatment.