Internet Insight Session - The Net of the Future
In November 2011, FrequencyCast was invited to a round-table discussion in London discussing the future of the Internet. The event was organised by Internet provider Plusnet, and the agenda was set by our listeners. Here's a transcript of our feature on this enlightening session.
Plusnet's Insight Session:
We recorded the entire Insight Session, lasting just over an hour, and that's available on our Plusnet page. We also put together a 20 minute summary of the session, plus interviews with some of the speakers.
Internet Industry Insight Session 2011 - Our 20 minute Review |
On this page, you'll find that 20 minute feature, and what follows is a transcript of our feature. An edited version of this feature appeared in Show 70.
Carl:
In November 2011, Pete was invited to take part in an industry insight session discussing the hot topics in the broadband industry, and what we can expect from tomorrow's internet. So Pete, first off - who was there?
Pete:
Well, the event was put on by the broadband providers, Plusnet, with the aim of identifying the trends and challenges for the next twelve months. The session was chaired by Matt Warman, the Consumer Technology Editor for the Daily Telegraph, and we'll be talking to him in a moment. Also present were Daniel Booth, who is the Editor of Web User Magazine; Ken Lo, who is a leading broadband and technology blogger; Bob Pullen from Plusnet's Digital Care team; Ben Trimble from the Quality & Service team at Plusnet; and Barry Zubel, who's one of the Plusnet super-users.
Carl:
And what is a "super-user"?
Pete:
Yeah, I was wondering what a super-user was, and that was actually one of my first questions. Barry apparently was a moderator of the Plusnet Community Forum for some time, so some of our listeners might have spoken to him, and he makes a lot of use of the internet.
Barry:
Yeah, I'm a super-user. I actually chose my current home based on the distance from the exchange, so I could get a good connection. I don't want to have to wait for things to download. So yeah, I use a whole range of internet services, and I use them heavily.
Carl:
That's your philosophy too Pete, isn't it? So, what did you learn, and what have you got to play me?
Pete:
The agenda was set by the FrequencyCast listeners. We sent out a tweet and a note in our newsletter asking for some comments and questions. What we're going to try to do in this show is to summarise the hot topics, go through some of your questions, and hear what was said. We'll be putting the full version of the session, plus our interviews, up on the website, if you want to find out more. To start with, we're going to chat to the event's host, to hear what the highlights of the session were for him.
Carl:
Remind me again - who was the host?
Matt:
Matt Warman, I'm the Consumer Technology Editor for the Daily Telegraph.
Pete:
And I wanted to know what Matt thought were the hot talking points of the session.
Matt:
I think there are lots of trends to pick out. You can talk about whether broadband growth is being driven by streaming of TV, of movies, of radio, online gaming. But I think one of the interesting things that came out was that Plusnet really didn't give the impression that their network was coming apart at the seams. We get the impression sometimes in some coverage that broadband demand is so enormous that networks can't cope. What Plusnet were saying was, if you have a properly-managed network, as obviously they would claim theirs is, then you can manage demand, you can give people certainly what they pay for, and also what they want in terms of broadband service. That means that most people are able to stream to download, to do whatever it is they think they need to do.
Carl:
Okay - lots to talk about, then. If I got it right, the session was put together by Plusnet, the "good, honest Yorkshire folk." These are the guys that actually have their own proper call centre, aren't they?
Pete:
Yep, they pride themselves in having a Yorkshire call centre, rather than outsourcing to another country.
Carl:
Yeah, we've spoken to them before, haven't we?
Pete:
Ah - well remembered. Yes, we spoke to the COO of Plusnet back in May of this year, and we were talking, if you remember, about World IPv6 Day - remember that?
Carl:
Oh yes - the new IP addresses. Wasn't that the day that the internet was going to break again?
Pete:
Not quite. If you want to hear our interview with Plusnet about IPv6, you need to be having a listen to show number 62, but to find out how IPv6 Day went for Plusnet, I spoke to Bob.
Bob:
My name's Bob Pullen. I work, as you said, for Plusnet on their Digital Care team. I maintain quite a close feedback loop, or at least try to, between what's being said about Plusnet out there on the internet and what us guys are doing at Plusnet Towers in Sheffield.
Pete:
So how did IPv6 day go for Plusnet?
Bob:
The IPv6 Day? - it went well. The network performed as it should do. My IPv6 connection certainly worked, which is more than I could have hoped for really. We had some novel uses that our customers put out there, one in particular being an IPv6 cat feeder, which was used to some degree by people, as the cat found out, with the mountain of food that was left next to his bowl towards the end of the day.
Pete:
I've heard there's some complaints about cat obesity as a result of that trial - is that fair?
Bob:
That's very fair, yeah - quite possibly.
Carl:
Now I know - thanks for that. So, did the thorny subject of broadband speed come up?
Pete:
Oh yes - quite a few times. What I thought was interesting was that only a tiny percentage of internet users actually make use of the faster speeds, or their maximum download limit. I asked Matt from the Daily Telegraph for his views on when we're going to see speed becoming a really big deal.
Matt:
Well, I think we're going to see an extrapolation of that trend. We're going to see more and more people using the web in every aspect of their daily life. That's not necessarily to say that networks are going to fall over any day now. I think, with events such as the Olympics coming up, with increasing use of TV for big events such as that, then we are going to see an awful lot more happening, but the networks do know that the Olympics is coming, it's not going to be a huge surprise to them, and we've already had the World Cup and events like that, where we've seen this growth coming. I think we'll see a lot more of it, but we won't see anything that will shock and surprise the people that need to plan the capacity.
Pete:
Obviously, we've moved on since the days of dial up, but if you want faster internet now, then you have to step up to a fibre service. Plusnet and BT offer up to 40 megabits of fibre, and Virgin can go as high as 100 megabits, but do we really need to surf at that kind of speed?
Matt:
Well, it's very much a chicken-and-egg situation, isn't it? If you haven't got these impressive speeds, then you can't use, or invent, the services that need those speeds. So we're nudging towards it, whether it's more streaming of HDTV, the ultra-high definition that's coming further down the line; better video games streamed more effectively online, and multi-player - all of those things. But, of course, if those things are coping on a five, six, seven-meg line, then do you really need anything higher? We will get those speeds, because it's the infrastructure that is being put in, and when those speeds come, I think we will see a whole range of services. But we'll also see a lot of services that are just what we've got now, but souped up, whether that's Skype, where you've got, it's on your 47" plasma TV, or whether it is video games that are just infinitely more realistic, but all of this stuff is not going to happen very quickly until we've got the infrastructure, because of that chicken-and-egg problem.
Pete:
In previous shows, we've reviewed services such as Apple TV and BT Vision, offering on-demand TV content. We've also got the iPlayer and Google TV of course, and services such as YouView and Netflix due to launch soon. So does Matt think the future of the internet has changed forever?
Matt:
I think more and more online is the straightforward answer. What you see, especially in younger households, is far less TV being watched when it's broadcast, and that doesn't necessarily mean people are terribly organised, and stocking up what they're going to watch for the weekend. It quite often means that people will try and get home for nine o'clock, and they'll have recorded something anyway, so they're just time-shifting it by 15 minutes or something like that. But increasingly, if that happens on the internet, then it makes everyone's lives that bit simpler, but except if you're a network, where it makes everything much more complicated, because you've got to provide the bandwidth for everyone watching TV, because that's what they might want to do online. It is a big problem, but it's not a big surprise.
Pete:
There was a lot of discussion about whether the internet is actually a commodity. Is it right to expect good-quality internet access in the same way as we expect to get mains gas, electricity and water?
Matt:
I think that broadband is something that, whether you need to be paying a bill, or interacting with government, filling your tax return, that sort of thing, people increasingly demand that that is done online. Now, if you're going to make it that sort of a necessity, then inevitably, like water, like gas, it's going to become a commoditised service in some way or other. What we see, though, is companies such as Sky, such as BT, wanting to add services on top of it, so that even if the core services basically are a commodity product, you get extra things packed on top of it.
Carl:
Interestingly enough, listeners Mark Garnett and Rob Dixon got in touch about the controversial subject of "up to" speeds. What are you up to, what's that about?
Pete:
Well, this is quite controversial. When you order your internet connection, you'll typically go to a website like BT or Plusnet or Orange or O2, and you'll see advertised prices and rates, typically things like, up to 20 megabits a second, up to 40 megabits a second, or with Virgin, up to 100 megabits a second, but when you actually get your broadband installed, you find you get significantly less than that.
Carl:
So this is download speeds, is it?
Pete:
That's correct, yeah.
Carl:
Right, okay.
Pete:
And as you can expect, a lot of people get very upset when they find they only get one or two megs of broadband, when they think they're paying for 20.
Carl:
Yes, I hear a lot about that - lots of unhappy people, not able to get the speeds they've paid for.
Pete:
And that was a hot topic for the Insight session.
Matt:
Well, there's been a huge amount of controversy about "up to" speeds, because literally in some cases, the up to speed that's advertised is a speed that no-one could ever get. The change is that now a percentage of people, a very low percentage, just ten percent, are going to have to be able to get that speed, if a service is advertised as "up to". Now, I think there will be a sort of sanitising effect across the industry of that, but it's still going to be something that winds consumers up a lot. Where I think we're going to see a diminishing of its importance is just because people are going to get services through natural upgrades from ISPs, that mean that they're coming up against that slowing much less often and much less obviously. So there is going to be some progress on that, but I think a lot of consumers are still going to be fairly cross, and legitimately so, that you buy an "up to" 24 meg package, and then when they give you your personal estimate, well six is all you're ever going to get.
Carl:
So, what about some of our listeners' questions?
Pete:
Mark Garnett asked about broadband sharing with other users.
Carl:
And Mark Hawkins asked, "Why don't UK ISPs offer a more managed network service, ie, preventing peer-to-peer connections and blocking access to sites connected with malware?" - malware? - is that right, malware?
Pete:
Absolutely, so that's the suggestion that the broadband providers actually take control of the network to stop nasty things happening, and unauthorised file sharing, that kind of thing. We did actually touch on that in the session, although it does remind me of the days of AOL and KIX, where you were effectively in a walled garden, and the ISP controlled everything - not really sure we want to be going back to those days, but I agree, there is certainly a place for the ISP to take a bit more control.
Carl:
So hold on a minute - with all these people going online, and we've got the Olympics coming up as well, is this all going to get clogged up?
Pete:
Well, that's the danger, and Plusnet were telling us about various traffic spikes. Here's a quick extract from the session.
Plusnet:
You've got two different things. You've got the general increase in streaming services, things like YouTube, iPlayer - they are regularly increasing on a week-by-week basis. We regularly see them breaking their own previous bests, as it were. You then also have the one-off events, things like the Manchester United v Man City game. A lot of people happened to watch that, because they may only have access to Sky Go, if someone else was hogging the TV, or if there was some reason why they weren't watching it at home. So you need to always keep in mind the general increase and the one-off events, and just make sure that you're covered for both of those. We are bringing forward the bandwidth that would have been allocated in 2013 into 2012, to make sure that we do have sufficient bandwidth.
Pete:
Apologies for the quality of the audio there - that was recorded at the session itself. We were talking there about a steady increase in the requirements for bandwidth over the coming years, but what about spikes in traffic? There are plenty of anecdotes out there about the electricity companies struggling when the adverts come on between Coronation Street, and the sudden demand for electricity goes up as people put the kettle on. We get a similar phenomenon with the internet, and in particular, as Carl mentioned earlier, events like football matches and the Olympics. We spoke to one of the other guys at Plusnet, to find out a little bit more about how spikes affect our internet use.
Ben:
My name's Ben Trimble. I work in the Quality & Service Management team. We look after many aspects of the service, most notably the broadband network, making sure that there's enough provisioned bandwidth for all of our customers to use.
Pete:
Now, we had the recent iOS5 roll out, where everyone was patching their iPads and iPhones furiously. What kind of impact did that have on your network?
Ben:
It did have a noticeable increase in the amount of traffic that went over the Akamai Content Distribution Network. It was around ten percent of the total network bandwidth that evening was the iOS5 update itself, and we also saw interesting trends - things like an approximately quadrupling in the amount of downloads for music, so often while people were updating their iPad or their iPhone, they were actually going on iTunes at the same time and looking to get a few more songs while they were there. So we had the knock-on effect of the extra usage from that.
Pete:
So did Apple give you any warning this was going to happen, or did you just suddenly start seeing all the alarm bells flashing, and people hitting their download buttons?
Ben:
Well, we make sure that we keep a good eye on the news, and all the things like sport listings, to make sure that we have the network capacity available for all of these upcoming events. We have blogged online about the iOS4 upgrade from last year, and we saw the effect that that had. This one was much, much larger, but it was still something that we were prepared for, although perhaps a little bit more notice from Apple about the size of the update would have been appreciated.
Pete:
In the discussion today, there was lots of talk about speeds. The "up to" always comes up, and we had some questions in from our listeners about this.
Can you just give me an explanation as to why it isn't possible to perhaps guarantee some of these higher speeds for customers?
Ben:
Well, we provide the highest speed possible for any of the customers on the particular provision service that they use. The up to headline speeds are based on somebody living very close to the exchange, with a fault-free service and a very short, perfect quality line. In more recent times, we've moved away from that advertising to advertising other aspects of the products, and we make sure that, during sign up, we inform customers of exactly what we expect their download speed to be, and shortly after their service has gone active, we send them another email to let them know exactly what their download speed is, so if there is any big discrepancy, we're always more than happy to look into that for them, and make sure any faults are found and rectified, to get the best speed possible.
Pete:
And generally speaking, the bottleneck is those little bits of copper wire down the street, is that where the limiting factor is?
Ben:
For the majority of customers, that's right, with the traditional up to eight-megabit-per-second network, and on the up to twenty-megabit-per-second network, the copper is the main reason in reduction speeds, mainly because of the different technologies that are in use. You go from a digital signal over your fibre networks up to the exchange, but after that, it's down to an analogue signal over the copper, which is always going to suffer from degradation, based on the length and quality of the line. But we're now moving to fibre services, both fibre to the cabinets, where you're reducing the length of the copper cable, and also using newer technology, which is VDSL as opposed to ADSL, to provide faster speeds, and also fibre to the premises, where you keep the digital signal all the way to the house, which allows speeds of currently up to 100 meg. Our first customer actually reported 107 meg, so we did quite well there.
Pete:
Wow! - okay, so 107 megabits per second, what do people want to be using that kind of bandwidth for?
Ben:
At the moment, I don't think there's a great deal of content distribution out there that would make use of such a headline speed. I think it's long been ingrained in consumers' minds that it is all about speed, the broadband, but probably I think it's more about the content that's being delivered. At the moment, even HD streams, iPlayer and as such, they're only really going to push sort of four, four-and-a-half meg out of your line at any one time, but for a normal residential household to be using 100 meg of bandwidth, they'd have to be doing something pretty special.
Pete:
Presumably though, that could change, looking at the trends? Out of the blue, we saw things like the iPlayer come along, that must have hit the network fairly hard when people suddenly started going away from traditional linear TV to downloading content.
Ben:
Absolutely, and I think that is exactly what's going to happen. Again, the requirement is for the technology to be there in the first place, well a lot of it is infrastructure-dependent at the moment, and until the vast majority of people can get these much faster fibre optic services, and the 1400 meg variance, then I don't think we'll see a huge drive from the content providers to supply that. But yes, certainly the content providers are going to follow suit with the infrastructure as it becomes more available; yes, we are going to see these higher bandwidth services, a particular service springing to mind being the OnLive streaming gaming service that's come about recently. The uptake in that, since it came across this side of the pond, quite significant - we've got over a million subscribers, I think they last reported as having. That's probably going to sap even more bandwidth than you'd expect a HD iPlayer stream to use. You're probably looking in the region of five, perhaps six meg of bandwidth. So perhaps, as people do take up services like that, yes, we are going to see these sort of 1400 meg connections being stretched a little bit further. Perhaps with two, three people simultaneously gaming using OnLive, or something like that, I'd certainly expect that to be the case.
Pete:
Next, we turned to Barry, who's one of Plusnet's super-users. If you remember from earlier, he chose his house based on the available bandwidth in his area. So we asked Barry if he makes the maximum use of his bandwidth.
Barry:
Not necessarily, I mean I have a decent connection, and what I like to do is use it on demand. When I want to use it, I want to be able to stream right now. I don't want to have to wait for things to download. So yeah, I use a whole range of internet services, and I use them heavily.
Pete:
Fair enough, so you're on an unlimited plan, presumably?
Barry:
Not at all. I'm actually on a fairly limited plan with Plusnet. I do have some additional products added to my account to make it faster to use, and I also take advantage of their overnight free usage, so I can actually delay the download of certain things.
Pete:
The overnight download policy - just remind us of what that is, and can you give us any kind of indication as to how heavily that's used?
Ben:
All of our current product sets include a free download time between midnight and 8am, so that's completely unlimited downloads. They don't count towards your monthly usage, and there's no cap whatsoever on the amount that you can download. Every day, when we come in to have a look at the traffic graphs, we see a spike at midnight, where everyone turns their downloads on. Bear in mind things have been quietening down from about ten or eleven o'clock at night, when people start to go to bed, we probably see around a 25 to 40% increase in the total traffic, from just before midnight to just after, when everyone switches that on.
Pete:
A nice little service, for those that like to do a lot of out-of-hours downloading. Our final question to the team from Plusnet relates to the future of the internet, and where we can see things going over the next twelve months. Here's Bob.
Bob:
I would say probably some of the key sporting events, particularly next year, and further advance in the development of streaming services and content providers, it will certainly be interesting to see where OnLive goes, and if the healthy take up continues throughout next year, because I can see that being a big consumer of bandwidth. There is the introduction of further TV services like You View in particular. I don't expect the usage with iPlayer, YouTube and Sky streaming services to be decreasing at all. I can see those increasing a lot.
Pete:
And the same question to the super-user?
Barry:
My money's on Netflix. Netflix has been announced for the UK. In the US currently in peak time, it uses around 33% of all internet traffic, and I think that's going to be a big one for 2012 in the UK.
Pete:
Okay, and Ben?
Ben:
I think that we're going to see a very steady increase in the streaming services over the next few years, but I think that we're also seeing a bit of a cultural shift with how people consume the content. So instead of people being reliant on their favourite programmes being on when they come in on an evening from work, people are getting more used to watching the programmes at their own leisure. So I think that will certainly drive the demand for streaming content. However, the introduction of OnLive is a bigger challenge, because not only do you have to deliver large amounts of bandwidth to support the applications, you also need to provide it at a very low latency, which is something that our network is certainly built to provide, but will provide definite interesting scaling challenges as that becomes more and more popular.
Pete:
Thanks very much, chaps. We'll take a look back in twelve months' time, and see just how right you were. Well, there you have it - that's our look at the Plusnet session. Thanks very much to Matt Warman for chairing, and to Daniel, Ken, Ben, Bob and Barry for such a lively debate.
Carl:
Yep, and thanks too to all our listeners for supplying the questions.
Pete:
And to Natalie and the team at Kazoo for putting on the Plusnet Industry Insight session.
Carl:
Yep - And thank you very much everyone, that's brilliant. And if you want to hear the full session from November, you can find a recording lasting just over one hour available for download right now.
Pete:
Yes, If you're interested in the future of the Internet, this is an excellent listen, and discusses streaming TV, plans for the Olympics, more on "up to" speeds, the Internet as a commodity, and what's around the corner.
Carl:
Yep - You'll find the full audio, more on Plusnet, plus a transcript at www.frequencycast.co.uk/plusnet. We'll also be using extracts of this feature in our December Show. FrequencyCast Show 70. That's the one to listen to.
Transcript continues: FrequencyCast Top Three Gadgets transcript
More on Plusnet:For more on Plusnet and to see if they're are available in your area, go to www.plus.net You'll find more audio from the Insight Session, plus our interviews with Plusnet, on our Plusnet Page |
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