ISPs facing bandwidth issues as media streaming hits mainstream

No surprise to anyone that the number of people streaming media is only going to increase rather than decrease. But rarely do we get any kind of hard numbers or insight into the issues that ISP’s are facing when it comes to dealing with provisioning bandwidth for their consumers. Dave from Community Plus has posted one of the most fascinating things to read about how the BBC Iplayer has altered already how people use bandwidth. This is a must read for everyone who is interested in doing anything with streaming media.

# 5% growth in total average usage since 1st December
# 66% growth in volume of streaming traffic since 1st December
# 2% growth in the number of customers using their connection for streaming since 1st December
# 72% growth in the number of customers using over 250MB of streaming in a month since December
# 100% growth in the number of customers using over 1GB of streaming in a month since December
# Cost of carrying streaming traffic increased from £17,233 to £51,700 per month Source: Dave

While the numbers focus on the influence on bandwidth usage from the BBC Iplayer, you can fairly easily figure out that any site that delivers streaming media, and any consumer that uses it is dealing with a looming train wreak in terms of delivery at the local loop.

The register is even more unkind with their assertion that the Iplayer is going to drive the ISP’s to broke, and broke fast.

The issue is that there is more out there than just the Iplayer, we have Itunes, streaming media sites like YouTube and Stage 6. ISP’s have to provision for the use of these sites even if they don’t want to, everything is about the customer experience. This is also one of the reasons that bandwidth caps are going to go over like a lead balloon. If you download a TV show from Itunes, it is around 500 Megabytes in size (on average for a 1 hour show). It is going to be very easy to bust through you cap ceiling very quickly just using legal legitimate services.

We have not even touched on what is happening with illegal downloading.

The crisis continues, and somewhere we are getting the idea that Nero is alive and well as Rome burns to the ground. Not ready for prime time, even 25 years into the technology, with the real question of “who pays for this one?”.

We need more network engineers.