Since the time BBC launched its iPlayer service in the UK at Christmas, it has rapidly become such a hit that Internet Service Providers are now claiming that it is threatening to bring the Internet to a halt with the severe strain they claim the service is putting on their networks. As a result, the ISPs with Tiscali in particular are now asking the BBC to share the cost of upgrading the network, which is estimated at £831 million to cope with the demand.
At present, UK viewers are watching over one million BBC programmes per week via the iPlayer with its Internet usage accounting for between 3% and 5% of all data transferred over the Internet in Britain. Last month, the service has grown 25% compared to February. The BBC is still trying to promote the service and is now bringing the service to the Nintendo Wii, allowing these 2.5 million game console owners in the UK to watch all the BBC programmes transmitted over the past seven days.
According to Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology, while its service is having an impact, the BBC doesn't believe it's a great one. He also said that if the BBC shares the cost of upgrading the backbone of the Internet in the UK, it would effectively become a unique way of using TV license revenue as a new business model for the ISPs.
British Telecom which provides a significant part of the Internet infrastructure believes that a solution to this issue would be to invest in building up the internal infrastructure that travels across the country instead of speeding up the links that connnect the customers’ homes to the Internet.
As the BBC iPlayer service currently delivers standard definition video programmes, it makes me wonder just what problems the ISPs will face once high definition Video-on-Demand (VoD) services take off. At present, BitTorrent has become such a bandwidth hog that many ISPs throttle ports to limit it or in a few cases block BitTorrent connections altogether, but there is no way ISPs will get away with doing the same with VoD services without running into major problems with customers.
Another problem already happening long enough is that many ISPs concentrate so much on upgrading and marketing "High Speed" end user connections to compete with one another that some are already unable to deliver their advertised rates due to how congested their networks have become. After seeing this long list of negative user reviews for Tiscali, I'm not surprised this ISP is complaining!
