It's Joe again
I think that youtube and the like are VERY different from iPlayer.
Look at the quality!!!! Damn image is smaller than a box of matches for crying out loud!! Plus youtube videos are short, in-between them you're not using much bandwidth. If you watch Lost on iPlayer you're using the line to full capacity for a good 40 minutes.
Upgrading the network is mind-blowingly expensive, if ISPs pay for it all (which they hardly can, seeing the competition and the limited margins in this sector) you'd need to multiply your broadband package price 3-4-5 fold. Now I owuldn't be happy about that!
""The Beebs' iPlayer service clearly doesn't fit the network, which wasn't designed to cope with that sort of traffic"
Very, very little of what we do now fits into the category of what the Internet was designed to cope with..."
True, but iPlayer doesn't fit the network by a considerable margin. If Youtube vids were of the same quality a iPlayer, you can bet Google would have had a knock on the door long ago.
It's true that the obvious solution is to up the price ocnsumers pay, but if that cost could be spread around to those who contricbute to the NEED of a better network, weel I think it would be fair.
I, for instance, don't really have the cash for a £50/month line, which is what we would be expected to pay, if ISPs upgraded the network without any help.
When internet first came around, my service provider was Deamon (cool name :-)
Well, they couldn't hope of forking out the necessary cash to lay down phone lines: they hired them from BT for a small fee. Today, how can ISPs hope to have the necessary cash to lay down optic-fiber???
It could seem fair that they do it, but I just don't think it's economically possible, just as BMW and Mercedes are not expected to pay for building roads :-)