Dave Tomlinson of the product team at the UK ISP Plus Net has written a long, detailed and (if you can stay with it) fascinating explanation of the real costs that ISPs in the UK face. For instance, the monthly rental payable to BT just for connecting the ISP's customers to their nearest exchange using BT's IPStream:
Based on customer numbers of around 200,000 the monthly rental after the rebate works out at approximately £1,700,000
And that's before you send any data anywhere. Tomlinson also explodes the "unlimited" idea:
When you look at the costs it's fairly easy to understand why the "unlimited" broadband deal just doesn't work. A constant speed [to the customer] of 1Mbps equates to around 300GB in a month and without the costs of building, staff, hardware, billing, etc. costs an IPStream ISP over £150 per month.
The money is serious, and the growth in streaming from sites such as YouTube and, more recently, the BBC (because of the iPlayer) is giving all the ISPs nightmares. But it's only when you see it set out with cold, hard (big) numbers like this that you see what ISPs are up against. Peer-to-peer downloads after midnight? They're not so troubled about that. Everyone logging onto iPlayer at 6pm to watch that episode of Ashes to Ashes they missed? That's rather more of a problem.
As Tomlinson notes in another post, it's been expensive having the iPlayer:
• 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
Wow. No wonder ISPs are making threatening noises about back-charging the BBC.
