While the network neutrality debate can sometimes feel a bit theoretical in the US, it's a live issue in Europe, and this week it hit the pages of newspapers across the UK. What made news was a set of demands by UK ISPs, which banded together to tell the BBC that the ISPs would start to throttle the Corporation's new iPlayer service because it could overwhelm their networks. Unless the BBC pays up, of course.

Tiscali appears to be leading the charge, though ISPs like BT and Carphone Warehouse are also said to be involved. Tiscali UK CEO Mary Turner told the Financial Times, "The Internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite. If the iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the Internet will get very slow service and call their ISPs to complain."

The answer, from the ISP perspective, is to start throttling bandwidth used to download content to the iPlayer "catch-up" service. UK users will soon be able to download complete BBC shows for up to a week after they first air; other broadcasters like Channel 4 already offer similar services. Because the BBC's offering is expected to be so popular, ISPs are now concerned that iPlayer traffic will degrade the experience for all users of their networks.

But traffic shaping could be avoided should the BBC agree to pay the ISPs cash to help cover the cost of upgrading their networks. Negotiations on the issue are continuing.

Who pays the piper?

The underlying premise of many of the ISP comments are that the BBC is passing its distribution costs onto someone else—an obvious echo of arguments heard in the US that Google and other popular sites aren't "paying their fair share." Typically companies like the BBC have to at least pay for the bandwidth their servers use, and could even opt to pay partner ISPs through peering arrangements between networks to optimize performance. This later option is rarely taken (most peering arrangements are free of cost), which leaves the BBC to worry about the costs of running their own services.

But the iPlayer isn't a direct-download service; instead, the BBC has chosen to use peer-to-peer networking as a way to cope with heavy loads and massive files. It's this aspect of the iPlayer that has ISPs up in arms, as local computers throughout their own networks become the servers for the BBC's content, and the ISPs won't recoup payment through normal peering arrangements.

This could certainly be a problem in the short term. While debates continue to rage about whether traffic shaping or simply expanding raw capacity are cheaper ways to solve the bandwidth crunch, the reality is that ISPs right now are having problems. Vodafone Iceland, for instance, just announced this week that it hooked up some deep packet inspection gear to its underseas Internet links to diagnose traffic slowdowns. It found that P2P was accounting for 60 percent of incoming traffic and 80 percent of outgoing traffic, and as soon as it began to throttle the total bandwidth available to P2P users, the network performed far better.

"Less than an hour [after hooking up the equipment], not only could we chart that 80 percent of the congesting traffic was P2P, but the traffic policy we activated instantly gave our on-line gamers and business users very high Quality of Experience," said network manager Palmi Sigurdsson. Such traffic shaping is common in Europe; Tiscali, for instance, already employs it on its own network.

When it comes to the long term, however, highly desirable and bandwidth-intensive services would seem to be a boon to ISPs, not a problem. They drive up demand for Internet access, make that access in increasingly valuable to consumers, and provide plenty of opportunities for ISPs to charge more money for higher tiers of service. If people only browse the web, how many would feel it essential to upgrade to a 20Mbps link? But the moment that services like iPlayer become essential, those higher speeds are much easier to advertise and sell.

Further reading: