I have to say that I am very impressed with Ashly Highfield at the moment. His defense of the public interest and also of BBC money is worthy of high praise.
He is 100% correct when he says that the Internet Service Providers should provide an Internet service. The whole way the Internet has developed (and I've been using ever since it could be reached in the UK) has required ISPs to buy bigger and bigger pipes, to support more and more users. The economics (which I have gone into before) provides that the more you buy, the cheaper each bit becomes. The ISPs (just to recap) are complaining because they need more capacity because the BBC iPlayer is popular, and people are suddenly watching whole half-hour and hour-long programmes, streamed from the BBC's servers. I am of the mind that if you are a Internet host (like the BBC in this case) then you pay for your end of the connection to the cloud and the end-user pays for theirs via their ISP. So, Mr Highfield is correct to reject the idea that the BBC should pay for ISPs Internet pipes. However, I wrote a paper about this when I worked at BT Broadcast Services (about ten years ago, in fact) about dealing with this situation, and as I recall (I don't have it here with me on Crete) there are a few ways to deal with it: 1. ISPs by BIGGER PIPES and upgrade their network. This is 100% the correct answer in the long run. Moore's Law tends to work at a bit-delivery level, so the great evil here is probably the BT wholesale provision which seems to be behaving somewhat monopolisticly, which is a tendency that I know BT has. 2. Use transparent or non-transparent PROXY SERVERS. This might work, but my experience of them is that transparent proxies reduce overall performance because they need to get in the way of each and every HTTP transaction. Non-transparent proxies are fine on corporate and educational networks because you deny access to people who do not use them, or you can do complicated configuration scripts. 3. Store and forward: Locate MIRROR SERVERS inside the ISP network. This seems a much better idea. Rather than the ISP being given BBC cash, which is an intolerable idea, the ISP provide the BBC with rack space 'inside' their networks for mirror servers. These could work in one of two ways: - use DNS to redirect the requests for content (the massive files that are the video 'streams') to these servers. - change the main BBC iPlayer to redirect requests for the content to the Mirror Server located in the ISPs network. DNS is a tricy beast and almost impossible to manage in these situations, due to the way it is cached. If people switch networks regularly, which they do, DNS trickery can turn into a nightmare. The second solution is clearly a better one. The iPlayer already checks the end-users IP address to ensure that they are in the UK. It would be very simple to check to see if the users is in the range for a particular ISP and issue a HTTP redirect (or similar) to the ISPs server to get the content. The BBC would simply have to provide servers for each ISP which are fed with each of the iPlayer content files when they are produced, and manage the IP address lists for each server on a central BBC machine. This would mean transferring each file to the BBC machine inside the ISP network just once, and this would take seconds as it would be out there in the 'fat pipe' bit of the cloud. Finally, the client Flash Player software would need to know that if the content could not be obtained for some reason from the BBC machine inside the ISPs network, by calling back to the main BBC iPlayer server with an extra parameter. The BBC could argue that the ISP should provide these mirror servers, but as the hardware and storage costs of much machines is 'tiny' (and fixed) it would be better for these to remain under BBC control, from a management and responsibility point of view. Now, cut the crap and make it happen... Brian Butterworth http://www.ukfree.tv
