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Not only that, but no ISP customer can ever download more from iPlayer or any other service than they have already paid for with their ISP subscription, or use more bandwidth than they were promised when they signed up.

On the one hand, ISP's offer "50Mb broadband", on the other they get the vapours when people actually use it.

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Yeah, I've been thinking about this and I agree with you. The problem here is the ISP pricing models. As part of their marketing, they create 'uncapped' tariffs based on a business model that says that most users won't download a great deal of data. iPlayer breaks that model but what it should mean is that ISPs re-evaluate their pricing plans rather than creating a tiered internet which has the incentives in all the wrong places.

Amusingly, some ISPs do quite well out of iPlayer. Plusnet has a fantastically cheap capped deal (6.95, which I suspect is a loss leader) that users almost immediately exceed by switching on iPlayer.

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