BT has publicly said it hopes to charge content owners for delivery of their programs over its broadband access network.
The issue has been circling around the industry for several years, and perhaps the major reasons it has not yet occurred is end user resistance, the fear that some competitors will gain share at the expense of ISPs who do charge content providers for access or other competitive responses by content owners. But the problem is very real.
A text message might consume just 140 bytes. A three-minute voice call might consume 1,800 bytes, an order of magnitude (10 times) more bandwidth than a text message.
A three-minute PC video clip might represent 33,750 bytes, another order of magnitude increase (100 times more than a text message).
A two-hour standard definition movie might represent 3.6 million bytes, an increase of five orders of magnitude (10,000 times more bandwidth than a text message).
And that's the problem. Video imposes loads far beyond anything networks have been expected to handle so far. Engineering a network for text or voice is one thing. Engineering it to handle video is something else again.
"We can't give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the service they want at the price they expect," says John Petter, BT Retail managing director.
Broadband providers such as Tiscali have been complaining for two years about the burden placed on their network by bandwidth-hungry video services.
BT says the trade-off could be quality of service guarantees for content providers.
To be sure, the issue of how to match the cost and revenue associated with broadband access is bedeviling. Consumption is growing while revenue per gigabyte is falling. Sooner or later the demand and revenue curves will converge, at which point the business model is destroyed.
Without changes in user behavior or pricing, the only question is how it takes before the converge point is reached.
European regulators also have been much more active than their North American counterparts in the area of compelling Internet service providers to assist in curbing content piracy. So it might not be surprising that BT is among the first European ISPs to publicly suggest matching video consumption with access fees.
The logic there is analogous to proposals some have made about pricing email to curb spam. Even slight charges "per message" are enough to destroy spam economics. Perhaps the same would prove true for charges to view content, one might suggest.
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