Having a Mother of a Day

David Heath
Sunday, 27 April 2008 19:38

Business IT - Networking

Every organisation needs to ask itself, ‘when is my “Mothers’ Day?”’ or in other words, when do peak usage loads occur and why do they happen?  More importantly, can we cope?  For ISPs, it would seem they cannot.

The term "Mother's Day" refers to the fact that every phone company around the world will tell you that their busiest day of the year is Mother's Day - everyone wants to call their mother on that one special day.  So, with the scene set, on with the story.
There is currently a major furore happening in the United Kingdom, one that could easily happen in Australia s well.  In essence, the ISPs there are rebelling because they are being required to live up to their supposedly unlimited access plans.

A little background.

A few months ago, the BBC made available a new service (called iPlayer) which allows viewers to download TV broadcast programs up to 7 days after their airing, with an in-built expiry of 28 days later (to protect the long-term rights of the copyright holders).  Not surprisingly, this quickly lead to an increase in downloads by the subscribers of all the ISPs in the UK.

Oddly enough, the ISPs are crying ‘foul.’  In essence their argument is that their networks were never built to handle these loads.  Never mind that the sum total of downloads doesn’t go near to reaching the sum total of customer download limits!

So, what was the solution proposed by the ISPs?  You’d be amazed!

The UK ISPs are asking the BBC to reimburse them for the cost of upgrading their networks to cope with the new load if iPlayer. 

In a long, rambling response James Packer, that well-known Son-of-an-Australian commented that it was a “big step, a pre-emptive intervention in a marketplace otherwise hugely competitive and moving very fast."  He also observed “I'm not saying it is a bad product, but I am saying it does crowd out competition and innovation. But we have it now, so there you are."  "It is less about the iPlayer and more the process that leads to its birth,” he added, directly criticising (so it would seem) the fact that his commercial organisation is required to carry traffic originating with a government organisation.

Allow me to assume that you’d be much less surprised by the response from the BBC.