James Delahunty
10 Apr 2008 23:14
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been locked into a war of words with Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the United Kingdom about who should be responsible for upgrade costs required for networks. The service providers claim that the bandwidth needed to support BBC's iPlayer is putting considerable strain on their networks, meaning they will need to be upgraded.
Ashley Highfield of the BBC believes that ISPs should be solely responsible for upgrade costs for their networks, while Simon Gunter, from ISP Tiscali, believes the BBC should contribute to the costs. The iPlayer allows viewers to catch up with programmes they missed on TV, and in its first three months of operation, 42 million programmes were accessed.
It is estimated that upgrades needed by ISPs in the UK to cope with the extra bandwidth demand could cost in the region of £830m. "The question is about whether we invest in extra capacity or go to the consumer and ask them to pay a BBC tax," Gunter said. Highfield responded to the comment, saying its inflammatory nature is not helpful.
"The success of the iPlayer should be of benefit to the whole UK broadband industry, increasing those who want to take up broadband," he said. In a blog post recently, Highfield outlined a 19 step plan for ISPs, but also appears to have included an indirect threat. "Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid)," he wrote.
Gunter's responded by saying it was a bit rich that a publicly-funded organization should tell a commercial body how to run its business. "Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help. There seems to be a lack of understanding about how networks are built. Either we are not explaining it properly or it is falling on deaf ears," Gunter said.
Michael Phillips of broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk, said that ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems. "They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing," he said. He recommended that ISPs cease using the term 'unlimited' when advertising its services and make it clear to consumers what they are really getting and how they may face higher charges for excessive bandwidth usage.