Brian Butterworth wrote: > 1. 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.
Abuse of dominant position is prohibited under Section 18 of the Competition Act 1998[1]. If BT are "behaving somewhat monopolisticly" shouldn't Ofcom do something about it? > 2. Use transparent or non-transparent PROXY SERVERS. As stated earlier it is unsafe to cache protocols you can't understand. Thus the BBC is blocking the ISPs from using this course of action. The BBC however should immediately cease this practice and use a protocol that ISPs can cache if they want. (HTTP has support for caching built into it, how forward thinking of them). > 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. I wouldn't have thought that the small increase in latency would be noticeable for a several hundred megabyte file. > 3. Store and forward: Locate MIRROR SERVERS inside the ISP network. > This seems a much better idea. It sounds a lot like some kind of Cache. And another question is *who* is going to pay for the servers that speak RTMP? This sounds like some kind of revenue driving scheme for the BBC's commercial friends. > the ISP provide the BBC with rack > space 'inside' their networks for mirror servers. A generic cache would be much more scalable, if the servers only mirror BBC data then this does nothing to solve problems with other sites. How does one mirror this data? Will it be available via rsync? Will it be mirrorable by *anyone* or does the BBC intend to pick and chose commercial ISPs to provide better access to. Again very shaky ground. > - change the main BBC iPlayer to redirect requests for the content to > the Mirror Server located in the ISPs network. Really unscalable, how is the BBC going to know which ISPs have mirrors and which do not? This would require each ISP to notify the BBC. Just seems wrong. Having every Content Provider have to speak to every ISP seems to go against the core of the Internet. If a pipe on the Internet is not running at 100% it is being underused! Andy [1] <http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/ukpga_19980041_en_2#pt1-ch2-pb2-l1g18> - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
