my unix

Further to my previous post regarding the ABC. Internode, Australia’s best internet service provider, used to provide access to all ABC content unmetered. Unfortunately since the ABC have moved to Akamai to host all of their digital content which makes it unfeasible to separate out the ABC’s content from other Akamai traffic with their current infrastructure. But don’t take it from me, Simon Hackett – founder and CEO of Internode gives a much better explanation:

Here is the current situation.

We’ve been actively involved with the ABC regarding this launch – they have been consulting major ISPs about it, encouraging them to consider unmetering the content.

Internode, with its history (of being the first ISP to unmeter the ABC in the first place) is, as you’d expect, interested in unmetering this new service. We’d love to.

The challenge is that right now, technically, we can’t – for the very reason that has been discussed in detail when we first had to withdraw our official unmetering of the ABC some time back now.

(That reason, in brief: That the ABC moved to using Akamai for bulk content distribution, which includes the new iView service, and the use of Akamai happens to make unmetering in the conventional manner basically impossible. This wasn’t intentional on anyones’ part – its just that the ABC moved to using Akamai without appreciating the side effect that would have).

Unmetering is based on source IP address lists (at least, it is for us and for almost everyone else). The thing with Akamai is two-fold:

a) The source IPs can be from anywhere in the planet, and the list of them is ever changing. Thats a pest, but not strictly impossible to handle, however there is also:

b) The source IPs of each cluster are shared between all content served by Akamai. So its impossible to unmeter ‘just’ the ABC – we’d have to unmeter 100% of what Akamai serve to the planet – which represents an un-tenable cost to us given that Telstra and Optus ports both have AGVC costs which would cause that to make practically all customers loss making overnight (Akamai serve out a lot of major world content).

iiNet are unmetering the ABC, and AFAIK they’re the only ones to be doing so – and thats because they happen to have set up their customer edge network a little differently to others, and they have some (very expensive) additional hardware installed at their customer edge that is capable of doing unmetering at a deeper granularity than source IP address.

Kudos to them for being able to, but its an investment that is massive, I doubt it was made for this specific purpose (i.e. its a nice co-incidence for them that they can do this, and that is their good luck), but I’m not aware of any other ISP in Australia with the same capability at this time.

We have been in conversation with the ABC about this issue for a while – and there are workarounds that involve the ABC changing their approach to content distribution so that it becomes possible for Australian ISPs to do unmetering based on known (and critically, unique) source IPs again.

We are working with them to help to be a part of the solution here – and I expect that over the next few months, we’ll collectively come up with an approach that solves it (and not just for Internode). No, we don’t need brainstorming here on how to do that, we know how to do that – its a matter of getting on with it – it just can’t be done instantly.

BTW, Internode actually still unmeters ABC content that comes directly out of the ABC peering link in Sydney, by the way, its just that most of their content no longer comes out via that path.

I’ve provided this long explanation so that you can all appreciate that we do want to do this, we are just not technically able to do so at this time (and neither, to my knowledge, is any other major ISP in Australia at this time).

The ABC are well aware of this (and key staff at Internode including me personally have been in discussions with key ABC staff about it for some time, with a view to solving it).

So I expect it’ll be addressed in the future – just not today.

Regards,
Simon Hackett

It is behavior like this that keeps me with Internode and the reason I will advocate them to friends and family. No bullshit, just the truth. Thanks Simon!