The situation is very similar to the electricity shortage in South Africa. Demand increased, profits increased, but no-one bothered to re-invest in the network. Now it's come back to bite them.

Quite frankly this isn't the BBC's problem. Why should they pay? ISPs don't deliver their advertised bandwidth in any case, and now more people are going to start noticing, which is bad news for the ISPs of course.

Nicholas, London,

It's an astonishing cheek of the ISPs to suggest that the BBC pays because it is increasing demands for their service. However, I think that it would be entirely reasonable for the BBC to give me a new telly so that I can take proper advantage of their HD broadcasts. I really do not know why they thought it acceptable to improve their offering without anticipating that it would make me want, nay need, a high-end new TV.

Christopher Moyse, Horsham,

Oh dear! When I see the list of " most watched ",I despair.Nuff said.

HD, Salisbury, UK

This isn't the ISP's fault. Yes, I'm often sharply critical of them, but ISP's dependent on BT have only one avaliable business model and it involves overselling on a massive basis.

The government needs to investigate BT's pricing structure - especially on their new "21CN" network which is going to cut capacity and increase prices for ISP's while dramatically boosting BT's profits.

And when I say "government", I don't mean the proven-spineless OFCOM, which needs to be shut down and a new office formed for actually overseeing the ISP market.

For cable, Virgin Media's issues with overloaded UBR's are, incidentally, entirely self-inflicted and I have absolutely no sympathy for them.

Leon Wolfeson, Oxford, UK

The phrase "Don't try to run before you've learned to walk" comes to mind. In the town where I live we have endured years of road-ripping and fibre optic cable laying and several new fibre optic transatlantic cables run nearby. In view of this one would expect phenomenal line speeds but this is not the case. Owing to overhead cables (copper) running through long lines of trees even dial-up can be very iffy. Faults have included severe tree rubs, corroded junction boxes and flooded manholes. How long ago was it since man walked on the moon? Another demerit of this area is that "Free line rental broadband" is not available. The far south west has always had telecommunications problems, in fact when I first moved here the trunk circuits to up-country were grossly overloaded. One used to get the message "All lines are busy please try later". It still seems like this at times as things run slow at peak periods. CD through the post is fastest!

Davey, Cornwall, UK

3 to 5% is a large share of the UK market but that pales in comparison to multinational companies and sites like Amazon and Youtube.
Is Tiscali going to start demanding that every site we visit buy their new bandwidth?

Rosalind Lewis, Cardiff, South Glamorgan

ISPs knew that, eventually, mass-market high bandwidth services like iPlayer would come. Yet, in the pursuit of minimising losses/maximising profits, most chose to ignore this inevitability. Bad planning, naïve business models and underinvestment are not the fault of content providers like the BBC. Consumers pay for a broadband connection and it is up to the ISPs to provide this, assuming reasonable use (which iPlayer is). ISPs that have pitched themselves as an ‘all you can eat’ flat rate provider (as many have) will struggle to pass on extra costs to consumers; margins are therefore coming down. This is what is driving the desperate arguments from ISPs that content providers need to compensate ISPs for the higher costs they are incurring as consumers demand higher bandwidth. It’s tough to see how the ISPs argument holds water.

David, London,

ISP are tiered and they do not all have direct access to the internet. If they do not want the content on their network they apply QoS or filter the traffic the ports the iPlayer use to stop or slow the traffic.

steve tea, manchester, cheshire

Due to rights agreements, the iPlayer is only available to play in the UK, i.e. users connecting from abroad cannot access the content on the iPlayer. However, the BBC has stated that they are working on an international version to become available as soon as possible.

Given the immense quality of BBC programming could this international version of the iPlayer lead to the eventual collapse of the world wide web?

Richard, Prague,

ISPs should remember that they're selling high speed internet pipes and not insurance policies. If they spit their dummies out because consumers choose to use what they've paid for it's down to them to sort things out. Good for Virgin though with their fibre optic network and more importantly existing iplayer-like service already being offered to customers on demand

Dan A, Harrogate, Yorks

Rubbish, people go on the Internet because they like the Internet if it wasn't i Player it would be something else, everyone is expecting more from the Internet because theres more out there. So get geared.
Besides, how many people pay for 'up to' 8 or 16 meg and what do they really get 2 or 3 at best. If the Internet Providers gave us what they promised in the sales blurb, and stopped referring to the small print whenever they have a problem, there'd be no problem.
If you pulled up at a petrol station (anywhere) and paid for 50 Litres and got 10, they'd be outrage.
I.P.s get your act together and stop complaining.

Graham, Manchester, U.K.

I live in a house that is just too far from the nearest exchange so I'm limited to a 512Kbps internet speed. Which in todays world when 20Mbps connections are advertised is pretty damn slow.

How is it the BBC's fault that people like me haven't receive a higher quality service from our ISP? It is insane that they attempt to demand money from the BBC, especially when a large number of people pay more for their internet connection than they do for their TV License!

Mike Hancey, Basingstoke,

ISP's have been lobbying anyone and everyone, to get anyone other than themselves to invest in upgrading their networks. There have been no major upgrades in years on the part of every ISP (besides BT's last mile), so they have seen in those years the growth, or potential growth, in internet media. Personally I believe that it should be up to the ISP to fund this massive upgrade, or risk falling even further behind in the world league for internet connections. Where we were once in the top 5, we've fallen massively since then, mainly because of ISP unwillingness to invest in their own networks.

Neil, Belfast,

The ISPs are caught between a rock and a hard place - they priced their services based on how we were using the internet, we all wanted (comparatively) cheap prices and we got them.

The BBC have driven up the amount bandwidth people are consuming (witness the endless promotion of iPlayer) but aren't willing to recognise their responsibility in the matter.

Other people who produce banwidth heavy services use systems called content delivery networks to move the content closer to the customer, there's no reason the BBC couldn't do the same.

If the moved some of the content distribution onto the ISPs networks then it helps the ISPs and the customers.

Andy Davies, Glos, UK,

This isn’t the problem of the BBC, and license fee payers should not have to subsidise ISP’s.

The ISP’s need to clean up their act, get rid of these very misleading “unlimited” offers and start charging realistic prices for the services people want. OFCOM should have stepped in and sorted this out a long time ago.

Luke, London,

This was eventually going to happen with the poorer of the Internet Service Providers. ISPs buy, for example, 1MB of bandwidth and sell that 1MB on to customers maybe 50 times (its allegedly over 100 times with some ISPs). This is called the "contention ratio". You're competing with many, many other customers for the same bandwidth (its all in the small-print of your contract). The problem is not with the speed of your line to the local exchange, but rather with the policy of some ISPs of getting good money for old rope.

Aaron, Coleraine, Northern Ireland

The right way to finance any extra costs to Internet Service Providers is by increases their prices to consumers. If services like the BBC Iplayer really take off many people will stop paying the license fee and simply watch TV through the internet. The BBC cannot expect to face reduced license fees and be taxed by Internet Providers at the same time. Neither do we want more pay per view programmes. We need to learn from what is happening to the Post Office through a misguided policy of opening it up to competition. Don't let the BBC go the way of the Post Office is going!

Bill Sykes, Birmingham,

I appreciate the Isp's problem , but as i see it , the internet and its use will continue to grow..watching media will grow (including quality and file download size) and probably surpass tv eventually. In a sense the isps playing catch-up is a inevitable consequence of this new technology and they should develop the technology able to cope and grow with this, after-all its not exclusively the BBC's iplayer using video media in this way, consequently if they fail to develop the services that customers want then they dont deserve to exist. Good on the BBC for developing the iplayer may it continue to grow.

nick green, bedford,

How much CO2 is produced every day from all the nibuless content on the internet WWW????

Can anyone in the media give an answer?????

- PS. How does it compare to i.e. air and car travel ????

Steve, London,

Isn't it a bit like water companies saying the soap manufacturers should pay towards the pipes because they encourage water use. We pay our ISPs for an internet service, they should obviously charge what is needed to provide it. They can't keep offering cheap deals and expect other people to subsidise their business.

Chris Brooking, Bradford, UK

What is OFCOM doing about this? The water industry is heavily regulated when it comes to things of this nature, water companies have to plan well in advance!

I do agree with all the other comments, this is not the BBC's fault. If the ISP's are going to sell 8meg lines they should be held responsible for this huge error in there judgment. I just can't believe the world we live in! Somebody breaks into a bank, gets arrested and spends x years in jail, big corporate company robs people left right and centre and they complain that the BBC should give them money? And it's not even the BBC, it's us, Jo public who have to pay for it!

Reegs, Exeter, Devon

The ISP's argument appears to be based on the proposition that iPlayer is responsible for more bandwidth than YouTube, Metacafe, porn sites and illegal downloads combined.

At under 15 million half-hour and one-hour programmes, per month (one or two per connected household per month?), I can't be the only person who finds this proposition hard to believe.

Ian Kemmish, Biggleswade, UK

Well you know when it comes from Tiscali it isn't necessarily genuine considering they have all these "great deals" and a five gigabyte download limit in the fine print.

That 5GB is great for only email but if thats the best they can offer most customers might just aswell go back to dial up.

Hal, London,

I agree that the ISPs have to improve their infrastructure but at the same time I dont like the fact that my download speeds are buggered up because people cant be bothered watching Eastenders when its shown, or remembering to program the recorder.

Simon, Leeds,

With this sort of logic perhaps electricity, gas and water company will want to charge white goods manufactures for any improvements. to there networks. It about time that ofcom or the government made Isp invest and upgrade there networks to provide the capacity that we are going to need in the future.

Markus, Bracknell,

The really worrying fact is that the BBC has spent so much money developing it's IPlayer service without giving any thought as to how people could access it and what it would cost them to use it.
Why are they so obsessed with outspending their commercial rivals in exploiting new technologies? They did this when Satellite broadcasting started - remember BSB?

m wood, somerset, uk

I got back from the pub tonight, and was able to catch-up on The Apprentice in my living room through my Wii. Now i can enjoy using iPlayer on my proper TV, I'll be using this service even more... If others feel the same, the ISPs wont be happy.

Luke Hall, Lymington, Hampshire

ISPs are reaping what they sow. They have oversold their network avaliblity for too long, and now people are using their 'unlimited' broadband, the proverbial has hit the fan.

The BBC pays to connect to the internet. The consumer pays to connect to the internet. Why should either pay extra on top, because of someone else failure to manage their network?

Adam, Manchester, England

The service providers are being a little cheeky here. They have sold a service to customers that is meant to be capable of x upload and y download, when a service comes along that utilises that ability they start to whine and moan. Surely they can't have been selling services they were incapable of supplying and even if they were shouldn't they have used the money we paid them to beef up the network knowing, as they did, that it was incapable of meeting the specification they sold.

I don't like the idea of the money coming from the BBC to support short sighted companies and I don't like the idea that my connection price will go up to pay for something I thought I was already paying for.

James R Whitehead, Liverpool, UK