S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

Wed Oct 20 18:53:29 UTC 2021

Not to be outdone, British Telecom joins the cephalopod games:

“Every Tbps (terabit-per-second) of data consumed over and above current levels costs about £50m,” says Marc Allera, the chief executive of BT’s consumer division. “In the last year alone we’ve seen 4Tbps of extra usage and the cost to keep up with that growth is huge.”

“When the rules were created 25 years ago I don’t think anyone would have envisioned four or five companies would be driving 80% of the traffic on the world’s internet. They aren’t making a contribution to the services they are being carried on; that doesn’t feel right.”

“A lot of the principles of net neutrality are incredibly valuable, we are not trying to stop or marginalise players but there has to be more effective coordination of demand than there is today”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/10/squid-games-success-reopens-debate-over-who-should-pay-for-rising-internet-traffic-netflix

For reference British Telecom has about 10 million broadband subscribers, so apparently those £200m capacity upgrades are stinging.

All in all, this raises an interesting question. Is British Telecom running their networks so hot, that just keeping the lights on requires capacity upgrades or are they just looking for freebies?

- Jared