BBC propose traffic light system to shame poor performing ISPs

The BBC are proposing a traffic light system to help users identify how
efficiently their ISP is handling iPlayer traffic. The news comes in a speech
to the FT World Telecoms Conference from Erik Huggers, Future Media director of
the BBC and follows Ed Vaziey setting out the governments position yesterday
which encouraged a
step away from net neutrality in favour of innovation.

Huggers suggests that a simple red / amber / green indicator would help
users understand the level of service that they are getting through their
service providers connection to iPlayer, which would explain any performance or
quality issues that they see. He was also keen to point out that the company
are happy to work with service providers to reduce congestion on the network.
One idea is the use of adaptive bitrate streaming using HTTP which can be
cached on ISP networks.

The continued proposal of using multicast technology to distribute content
was also made, however the current broadband platform doesn’t provide much
benefit to this other than saving on the bandwidth between the ISP and the BBC
iPlayer platform. Providers such as TalkTalk or O2/BE which operate their own
LLU equipment could make use of the technology to help deliver content to
users, and TalkTalk have indeed announced a deal which could see CDN technology used in
this way. There could be a change to the use of multicast across BT’s network
however. The proposed use of
VULA (Virtual Unbundled Local Access) for fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC)
installs could leave scope for multicast services to be delivered over the
wholesale network whilst still allowing the general Internet access to be
handled by the broadband provider.