How I miss living in a cabled area; being able to sit on your sofa and watch a program you forgot to set the Sky+ for truly is the next generation of TV.

It is intresting to note that Virgin media are activley promoting the iplayer on their site for their customers, why? beacuse their network can handle it.

BT have been happy to rake in millions over the last 2 decades, but have invested little of this money back into their network, prefering to look after their shareholders dividends rather than look to the future.

Its like paying for petrol for a car and then being told you can only use the fuel for driving up and down a few roads.

The real problem as i see it are these companies who operate "unlimited" use policies based around fair usage policies.

Their idea of fair is that people should be penalised for daring to try and use the product they were sold.

Companies like Tiscali are hinting that they want the BBC to pay towards their unrealistic, oversubscribed, and untenable pricing structures, and when you combine that with fact that you (currently) do not need a tv licence to watch streaming content this seems to be wishful thinking.

Having said that there is the other side of the coin, first it was illegal P2P, then it was legal P2P, then it was download stores, now iPlayer, soon presumably other services, the increases in speeds available have raised the possible applications of the system and applications are now appearing one by one to fill it, perhaps then what we are finding is that the model of overselling bandwidth to enable home users to purchase the bandwidth of broadband for much less than the true cost of that bandwidth is becoming a restriction perhaps as this continues to increase ISP's may have to consider offering unlimited packages again, or ones with high allowances, only unlike last time actually reflecting the true cost of bandwidth in their pricing.

The only problem I can see is while attempting to attract as many people to broadband through overselling at a lower price point than the true value while managing to actually make a profit as well has inadvertently shot themselves in the foot because now many users think that bandwidth is actually a cheap commodity and it isn't certainly not towards the local loop end especially (the backhaul end is far cheaper, but one massive fiber is much cheaper to maintain and run than thousands of bits of low capacity copper on the other end).

Has anyone ever considered that perhaps what we are seeing is that cheap broadband may well be as much of a myth as the unlimited broadband was?