Further to my earlier post about Virgin Media putting services into the “Internet bus lane” unless a premium is paid there are some people coming up with more interesting ways of rebelling against this.

A lot of people are showing understandable shock about Virgin Media’s stance and it isn’t exactly a good plan to sell their service generally - I’d personally prefer an ISP that will provide me access to everything I want at the fastest possible rate not just what they are being paid for.

There is a lot of mentioning of a certain Mr Richard Branson’s name and how he could be involved with this kind of thing? I seem to remember however (and I’m happy to be corrected) Virgin wasn’t the largest component when they merged with NTL. NTL had a awful reputation for customer service and of course the Virgin brand was very strong so merging and taking the Virgin Media name made a lot of sense. Not for Virgin unfortunately it would seem as I think this has been incredibly damaging to the Virgin brand as a whole. Not Mr Branson’s finest hour.

Well further to my earlier post “Video is putting ISPs under strain” the new CEO of Virgin Media has jumped in saying net neutrality is “a load of bollocks”. Hmmm eloquently put.

Essentially it would seem that Virgin Media are negotiating deals with content providers to provide a faster service. So if a provider doesn’t pay Virgin Media their service will be negatively affected by throttling the bandwidth.

So Virgin Media is the new media highwayman now? Holding companies to ransom. Stand and deliver - your money or your service is going to be a flop! It might be the time to bring back hanging.

It would seem that the BBC’s iPlayer is putting quite a bit of strain on networks around the country. Now ISPs seem to be trying to pass the cost of needed upgrades onto content providers such as the BBC.

I can’t see the ISP’s case here at all essentially they have fallen behind the new technology appearing - some of which has been around sometime. Certainly the move to video isn’t much of surprise so why haven’t they tried to keep up?

By trying to trying to pass the buck onto content providers means these companies aren’t going to be so willing to innovate new technologies because of the costs that might be passed on which could effectively clip the UK’s ability to keep on the cutting edge.

I understand they are seeing the BBC as a different case because “of the unique way it is funded” but because other content providers are doing similar things such as 4OD I don’t see why the license payer should supplement ISPs and specifically BT’s underinvestment in broadband capability.

It’s all very well that BT is trying to roll out 21st century network but we all know this is going to overrun and have teething problems. Can the UK’s backbone even support this new network? We shall have to see.