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Leader: BBC iPlayer broadband row - who's really to blame
Bandwidth dreams and nightmares for ISPs

By silicon.com

Published: Thursday 16 August 2007

Claims by ISPs that the BBC should fund the extra bandwidth needed by users that want to download content from its online TV service iPlayer seems a little out of touch.

Tiscali says as the BBC is responsible for the content and the distribution service, it sees no reason why the corporation shouldn't fund the extra bandwidth that users will be using.

As one silicon.com reader pointed out - ISPs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the content people want to access on the web.

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Downloading of rich video content is only going to grow over the next few years and ISPs will need to be able to cater for this. If ISPs can't cope, they're not going to last much longer in the changing online landscape.

The specific issue seems to be that iPlayer is a peer-to-peer system so that it uploads and downloads data at the same time, making it potentially bandwidth-heavy.

Added to this, the programmes take around half an hour to download so a lot of bandwidth is used over a sustained period of time.

But to charge a content provider to distribute material just because it takes up more bandwidth cannot be justified in the long term. More and more services will appear which demand as much, if not more, bandwidth and so perhaps one day soon the demands of the iPlayer will seem positively thrifty.

With the number of users for iPlayer likely to be ramped up over the coming few months it's really down to the ISPs to adjust so their customers can make full use of what the service has to offer.

Eventually, ISPs will have to accept they need to offer greater bandwidth and download limits so customers can use the growing number of services but for now some at least may continue to stick their heads in the sand.

Sure, the ISPs might work on thin margins for consumer broadband. But there is certainly a sense that now the iPlayer has arrived, something that might actually make consumers want to use the high speed home broadband they have been sold, that the ISPs are turning round and asking for more money.

It's not an argument that's going to impress businesses out there working on the next big thing - be it a media player or a website - that demands lots of bandwidth. They won't want to pay the ISPs for the extra bandwidth used and nor should they. If ISPs were allowed to tax content providers in this way it would have a chilling effect on the industry.

Consumers have been sold a fully fledged broadband service at a set price and if that service can't handle the rich video content users want to see then it's a problem for the ISP and its pricing structure, not the BBC.

The ISPs have sold the broadband dream - now they must make sure it doesn't turn into a nightmare.