Quote:
Originally Posted by Quexos
The only cost is for ISP's to strengthen it and if they are smart they do it once and get the widest possible bandwidth which is a one time investment and they are good after that for a long time (until new technologies allow for even wider bandwidth)
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It is due to bandwidth. ISPs (at least in the UK) tend to lease access to "pipes". They pay for that access whether the portion of the pipe they've leased is used 100% or not at all.
If you have lots of heavy downloaders (doesn't matter if they're pirates or not, aside from which legit iPlayer users may use more bandwidth than illegal ebook pirates!) the ISP would either have to lease more pipes and increase their monthly costs to allow for the extra bandwidth heavy users occasionally use. Or, they let their customers suffer through packet loss and general slowness during high congestion times.
The problem afaik is when you have normal peak use at say 90% of your single pipe capacity, then a few extra heavy users knock that usage to 101%. You can't just lease 1% more, you have to lease an entire second pipe which doubles your monthly costs due to handle that extra 1% of over usage and 99% of that cost is going to waste as the majority of the pipe is unused. Not leasing more means during those times, all your users will see high pings, slow downloads and packet loss.
Now, if average usage increases to 101% and piracy took it to 110% it'd make no difference, the ISP would still have to upgrade to a second pipe to cover the average usage or face lots of complaints over a poor connection.
I've vastly over simplified of course, since for the odd time you hit 100% ISPs could traffic shape to reduce bandwidth usage across the board and avoid packet loss, but there is still a tipping point where you're over subscribing a single pipe either because of increased use overall, or a few heavy users.