Increasing Charges - Time to get back to providing cheap Broadband / phone service

[#1]

The biggest single factor impacting your bandwidth requirements is broadcast quality. Streaming video at a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels doesn’t require much data. On the other hand, sending a video file with full high-definition resolution takes a great deal more.

And i PAY more for the 80/20 so why should i pay more to Game and watch Iplayer ?

[#2]

@rongtw I never said I had any issue with gaming or with IPlayer, or people watching YouTube or streaming sports videos from websites. This isn't about people using the internet for traditional internet usage.

The issue I have is people using their connections to stream live tv from premium services such as Netflix because streaming tv was recently reported (I can't find the article) as being the cause of ever rising prices because connections were being slowed at peak times and IP providers were having to find ever more bandwidth to accomodate streamed tv services.

BTW, Amazon Prime suggest 15mbs and Netflix 20mbs for their 4K streaming rates. When that's for hours on end constantly, every night, that's a lot of bandwidth, not the occasional YouTube or web hosted event.

[#3]

Netfix doesn't do live TV...

[#4]

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@rongtw wrote:

And i PAY more for the 80/20 so why should i pay more to Game and watch Iplayer ?

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Paying more for 80/20 is not the same as paying more for bandwidth consumption - it is paying more for a faster service - which as someone since commented faster is not required for streaming TV - the biggest consumer of bandwidth.

A 'single price no matter how much you consume' is like a gang of blokes going out for an evening's boozing ... they all put £20 in to the pot out of which all drinks for the evening are purchased.  The greedy beggars who drink quickly get more for their money than those more moderate in their consumption.  I think we all know just how irritated we get about those taking more than their fair share out of the communal pot ... unless of course they the takers: then their response is "tough, if you don't like it simply drink quicker - keep up with the rest of us".

Paying a fixed amount into a pot and expecting unlimited consumption is simply not reasonable.  The greed of some puts the price up for everyone.

EDIT: IIRC 'unlimited' is not even subject to a FUP these days... 

[#5]

The trouble with these horrible analogies is that bandwidth is not exactly used up in quite the same way as all the things it gets compared to. The total amount of bytes you download does not really make any difference. Taking 10 hours to download 10GB does not use as much bandwidth as downloading the same 10GB in 20 minutes.

Having a faster service means that you can use more bandwidth. And these people are paying more (at least as far as the different speed tiers of FTTC go).

ISPs need to have enough bandwidth to meet peak demand, it's not really anything to do with the total amounts people download, it's the total speed required for what all their customers combined are doing at the busiest time.

What one person might characterise as greedy another probably considers as completely normal modern usage of the Internet - and there's not really much point in having all this bandwidth if you can't do anything with it!

[#6]

@Townman Agreed.

The whole point of being unlimited is being unlimited and I readily admit I'm not a light user.

However, with IP TV (iplayer and similar etc aside), something new has come along that simply munches up bandwidth at a ridiculous rate. eg imagine someone who watches a premium tv streaming service for 4 hours every night at 20mbs. That's 28 hours per week continuously at 20mbs. That is completely different to someone who watches Youtube vids for 10 mins at a time and may just watch a few with normal surfing or other non intensive tasks inbetween, or someone who watches the occassional catchup via iplayer or similar, or someone who games. Those are all traditional activities that don't adversely affect bandwidth and are already accounted for in the fees we pay.

In streaming premium tv services though, we have a new kid on the block that munches up bandwidth like no tomorrow and is now if some reports are to be believed, behind the prices rises we're now seeing. Now don't get me wrong here, I don't begrudge anyone the right to watch tv over the internet, although I think the quality is pants (I recently accidentally signed up to a trial of Amazon Prime, which I cancelled straight away, but I did peak at a video, and at HD streaming, the quality was so bad I refused to watch it!). However, that said, I do think that if people are going to watch such intensive streams over the internet then the cost of the extra bandwidth should fall on the premium tv users and not everyone else.

To use Town's analogy above, it is like us all buying a flask of ale and one person drinking nearly the whole lot, so next round, we all have to put more in to allow for their extra drinking, it's not on.

....and to go back to my original point, a 150% increase in Broadband and Phone over the last few 5 years when the economy has had inflation below 3% is ridiculous and more to the point, is now making it so expensive that many people such as myself, who don't stream premium IP Tv services, can no longer afford to pay anymore rises. Literally, if it goes up again, I'm looking at being forced to cancel my contract and instead resort to my mobile phone for both.

[#7]

@ejs

Are you suggesting that the only thing ISPs pay for is concurrent speed capacity? That there is no charge for volume of data carried?

If that’s the case then why has there been a history of charging by used capacity? And indeed on some products capacity limits still exist.

[#8]

No I'm suggesting contracts have always been paid for by capacity of usage.

Firstly with limited bandwidth per month products and then with unlimited, although I believe unlimited products still carry a reasonable use clause so someone torrent streaming 24/7, can be denied service.

The big issue is the prices rises which are endless and many many times inflation.

The issue behind them is the cause, of which I've seen it suggested, (rightly or wrongly), that TV streaming is to blame with the implication that ISP's re having to spend money increasing capacity which in turn is being reflected in the pricing. That being the case, isn't it right that users of premium tv streaming services that are causing the strain, pay for the results of causing that strain?

[#9]

@Alplus1 being new around here you might not have realised that a post starting with an @tag is directed to a particular member, in the above case @ejs not you.