Webinar Wire

Will ISPs Kill Web Conferencing?

Posted by Ken Molay March 24 2008 3:28 PM EDT

1 comment

There is a fascinating article in today's Xconomy opinions forum. It was written by Rich Baker, the founder and CEO of Glance Networks.

Rich points out that some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may put artificial limiters on data flow over their networks in order to load balance or improve performance for some types of applications at the expense of others. The ISPs sometimes (Often? Usually?) don't tell their customers about the throttling and may even deny that the action is in effect when it is. You can reach your own decisions on whether this is due to willful lying or just a general lack of internal communications about what policies are in place.

Rich points out that the algorithms that at least one Canadian ISP used to identify high volume data transfers (put in place to slow down peer-to-peer file sharing such as BitTorrent) affected his company's screen sharing data bursts in a live web conferencing session. So some Canadian customers of Glance thought that Glance was not working properly when it was actually a hidden change to the way the network was carrying the traffic.

This practice is insidious and has the potential for severely harming the perception of web conferencing as it grows in popularity and use. Many web conferencing companies support screen sharing (aka: application sharing) as part of their feature sets. Some companies, like Glance and Citrix, depend on it as their sole means of transmitting information between presenters and audiences.

If the ISPs won't share information on what these companies can do to comply with network traffic policies, and indeed won't even admit that they manipulate the stream, then there is no way to work within the system to make a better user experience. We'll see more angry users and people who say that web conferencing is a lousy way to get sales demos, software training, and customer support.

I get very frustrated on the whole subject of ISP behavior. They effectively answer to no one, they often have monopolies on services to a consumer household, and they fight against the very thing their service is built to support. Telling computer users they shouldn't send so much data over the network is a ludicrous solution to their problems. How about upgrading the physical network so the United States comes up to par with nations such as Japan, France, and South Korea?