BBC is under fire

The BBC is under fire from one of the biggest ISPs in the UK - Tiscali - which is demanding money from the broadcaster to recoup the costs of serving users of the BBC's popular TV streaming service, iPlayer.

I find it hard to understand why Tiscali thinks it should receive money - other than the possibility that it perceives the BBC as an easy target.

The BBC estimate that the service has increased the UK's use of bandwidth by between 3 and 5%. That is puny compared to the effect of peer-to-peer file sharing - much of which is illegal. A report last year found that between 50 and 80% of all traffic in the countries studied comes from peer-to-peer.

Tiscali is among the many ISPs that use a technique called traffic shaping to reduce the bandwidth available for peer-to-peer programs. Doing the same to iPlayer traffic would be simple. But not very popular.

As yet Tiscali is the only one to grumble about the iPlayer. Other ISPs have said they are so far coping with the extra demand from the it and other video services. But as streaming video gets more popular and of higher quality - in part thanks to the success of the iPlayer - ISPs will likely feel the effects.

It is plausible that one result will be changes to the way "unlimited" bandwidth packages are sold. They will have to either get more expensive, or start to disappear, with customers paying for what they use.

Installation of optical fibre systems - which will be faster than delivering broadband over phone lines as most UK ISPs do - may also become more urgent.

But our increasing appetite for bandwidth may in future become a problem for cellphone networks too. The latest generation of devices like the iPhone will make using the mobile web much easier - and online video is already part of it.

So far, advances in the capacity of the infrastructure used by phones has kept well ahead of demand. But perhaps, not long from now, wireless network operators will also start to feel their bandwidth squeezed, as people stream TV during their commutes instead of listening to music.