Forum Moderators: phranque
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.
[washingtonpost.com...]
Obviously this would cause an extra barrier for anyone getting into the hosting game, but will it really affect most webmasters aside from increasing our monthly package costs slightly? Not trying to defend the proposal or anything, just asking honest questions.
I'm sure what BellSouth is anticipating is their ability to deliver vast bandwidth once "fiber to the home" becomes prevalent. No doubt they want to find ways to turn that extra bandwidth into money. (Simply providing better service to their customers apparently isn't enough of a reward.)
The problem that William is battling with is that his company (ditto NTL, BT etc.) are going to be providing an absolutely essential link in the chain between web service providers and their consumers; yet once their core services of voice and TV are superseded by pure software overlays ontop of TCP/IP they will have no revenue stream that can even come close to covering their costs. They hardly make any money as it is as there's only so much you or I are prepared to pay per month.
Therefore; something is going to have to be worked out that enables "last mile" providers to somehow charge for access to the consumer - simple as that. I'm just looking forward to the day that I can go signup at www.discovery.com and watch their programmes on demand, online. That same day I cancel my cable TV service. It's not far off.... :)
I'm not surprised that they would come up with a scheme to manipulate their service to their own advantage at the expense of their customers' surfing experience.
If you don't give us money, your website will be slower than those of your competitors
If this goes ahead I will be the first to ban all visitors from those ISPs to all my websites, and show them a notice explaining exactly why, with a list of suggested ISPs (and affiliate links) which don't slow. I don't take blackmail from anyone, and that is what this is.
If an ISP thinks it would hurt me to have a slowed website, that's probably true. But I believe that if their customers instead of seeing slowed websites see no website at all, it will hurt the ISP more in the long term.
Incidentally, who is going to pay the extra fees for wikipedia, and for the millions of blogs and interesting non-profit websites?
True... but I think these guys are looking a few years out, when people may expect fast-loading rich media on every page, and static HTML may seem oh-so-quaint. Then again, books haven't gone away yet. :)
They can't slow down your site if your pages are only 25k.
They can just wait a few seconds before sending it... it's not just bandwidth, but response time, which contributes to a fast site.
Brett had some really good comments about this wrt webmasterworld and designs, but I can't find them now.
They can just wait a few seconds before sending it
That's how I read it too. It's about "load speed" and not bandwidth. Having said that, I can see a similar viewpoint being taken by ISP's in relation to VoIP - "use our voice services and it'll work fine, use theirs and you might notice delays and echos".
It's a potentially massive revenue generator of course, although I can see some legislative hurdles to overcome (anti-trust etc) as well as consumers voting with their feet and moving to the new market "we won't throttle your access to any site" ISP's.
It's a dangerous game, that's for sure. This is Bell South though remember.
TJ
ISP Salesperson: "Why Mr. Web Site Owner, our company would never impede anyone's traffic... that would be contrary to the high ethical priciples established by our founders.
Furthermore, we have great news for you. Due to our heavy investment in technology and infrastructure, we ARE able to offer important and useful sites like yours our new PageLoadEnhancer service, which will make your site faster than your less-worthy competitors. When you see how little it costs, you won't be able to refuse."
Salesperson continues in a lower tone, "You know, with a great site like yours, you really don't want to risk high latency, images that take forever to appear, garbled audio, jerky video, or the occasional 'page not found' error, do you? Sign right here and we'll make sure you don't have those kinds of problems."
I'm kidding (mostly) about the second part, but the first part would be a likely sales approach if this idea ever gets that far. It would be presented as an enhancement service.
They must be betting that their competitors - the cable companies - will follow their lead and charge extra for a jitter-less connection, too.
If the ISP is supplying local caching to enhance page load time, then that is nothing more than outsourced geographic load balancing, already common practice for many websites and rich media suppliers in particular.
If the ISP is actually meddling with the bandwidth provided between the user and the webserver based upon payments made, then what they are operating is blackmail pure and simple.
If your bank told you that instead of doing what they should and answering the phone quickly, they want you to start paying extra for the privilage and sitting there on hold if you don't agree to the payments, would you see it as blackmail?
If your water company suddenly wanted payments to give you a reasonable water pressure during peak demand hours?
<edit>
Regarding the VOIP issue... I can see problems with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and/or the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. All of these include or refer to the right to transmit information across frontiers without impediment - so if you are going to impede my VoIP call to Germany then you'd best get familiar with my lawyer.
And yes, you certainly are impeding my transmission of information - it's clearly not a technical limitation - since calls through 'paid up' VoIP services work...
</edit>
Hollywood
If I sign up for 1Meg broadband I expect 1Meg broadband for all sites not 1Meg for some and 512K for others, etc.
Kaled.
if you're a website owner, you're going to lose customers if your site loads slower then your competitors who went along with the blackmail.
ogletree, "Buy our service or your site is going to load slower", how can you not call that blackmail? Extortion?
If the telcos don't make money it's because their infrastructure is costing more than their competition's. No amount of sneaky pricing can help that. Adapt or die.
If they get the idea to give us "2 tier service" via broadband ..they will jump on it and we have no legal protection against it ..
please SHHHHHHHHHHH!
[edited by: Leosghost at 11:09 pm (utc) on Dec. 14, 2005]
Does BellSouth realy hold the cards?
That's how I read it too. It's about "load speed" and not bandwidth. Having said that, I can see a similar viewpoint being taken by ISP's in relation to VoIP - "use our voice services and it'll work fine, use theirs and you might notice delays and echos".
I've heard reports that Telcos in several countries are already doing this to try stop Skype et al from working well.
Rant ..you bet ..!Truth too..:(
So, when you buy 10mps at your hosting service, you can get the 10mps slow, the 10mps medium, and the 10mps fast.
