Sir, With the current debate about the internet being at serious risk of crashing under the weight of video and TV on-demand (report, April 10), many doomsayers are suggesting the physical infrastructure of the internet is to blame. However, I believe that it’s more likely that the economy of the internet will collapse before the infrastructure does.

As consumption habits change from static webpages to bandwidth-hungry applications such as video, and with the emergence of the first successful services such as iPlayer from the BBC, the industry is ignoring the fact that traditional technologies used to move digital content from broadcasters to the consumer over the internet weren’t built to cope with the massive increases of internet traffic that these services require.

The internet currently delivers two exabytes (two million gigabytes) of consumer-generated traffic per month. Recent research suggests this will quadruple to more than eight exabytes per month in just four years’ time. Internet service providers (ISPs) find themselves in a difficult position, with flat-to-declining average revenue per user, slowing subscriber growth and a massive increase in cost to deliver a whole range of new video services from broadcasters to their end-users.

Broadcasters recognise the importance of a high quality of service to end-user adoption and pay premium prices to deliver their content, generally to a range of specialist providers known as CDNs (content delivery networks). Unfortunately, they don’t share their wealth with the ISPs, and simply dump the content owners’ traffic on the ISPs’ doorstep for final onward transmission to the consumer.

Thus ISPs are faced with huge increases in traffic on their networks, and the costs associated with operating and delivering that traffic, without sharing in the fees that broadcasters are paying for their traffic delivery, and without the ability to charge increased fees to the consumer.

The industry as a whole needs to fix the way that video content is currently delivered online — otherwise monthly bills and lack of income will stunt any growth for the industry, and then start to have an impact on customers.

Phill Robinson

CEO, Velocix

London SW1

Sir, I pay for a broadband service at a speed of 8 megabytes, but on testing this I find that I usually receive no more than 1,400 Kb/sec — one fifth of the connection speed described on my contract.

After hearing on the radio what sounded to me like an admission that my ISP (among others) lacks the capacity to give its customers the service they are paying for, perhaps the regulator should step in and take action against the ISPs for having knowingly sold more than they had the capacity to deliver.

Gareth Child

York

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