Several major U.K. broadband providers have warned the BBC to con...

service providers (ISPs) said to fret over how much bandwidth the BBC’s new iPlayer could tie up. The service lets viewers watch TV shows online on a seven-day catch-up basis, The Independent on Sunday said. The ISPs reportedly told BBC that they will consider traffic-shaping to ration iPlayer access. Internet players by Channel 4 and ITV could gobble more bandwidth, The Independent said. The Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA), reportedly has been asked to speak for industry on this issue, has no official position, its spokesman told us. But in ISPA’s January bi-annual newsletter, devoted to the issue of net neutrality, ISPA Council Chairman Jessica Hendrie-Llano said ISPs are looking at options for maintaining service quality in high bandwidth use situations, including prioritization of traffic or charging content providers for network access. But, she said, contracts between ISPs and content providers raise concerns about whether access to information will be constrained by financial relationships. The industry code of practice now advises ISPs not to block or filter any service to customers unless they get clear explanations for the action, Hendrie-Llano wrote. The European Commission is considering net neutrality in a review of the electronic communications regulatory framework. With Europe’s tendency to “to take a back seat” in the net neutrality debate, the BBC scenario or something like it was needed to bring it to the top of the Commission agenda, said StrategyAnalytics digital consumer practice analyst David Mercer, asking rhetorically ISPs plan on charging. If it’s to be end-users, ISPs will have to act uniformly or wind up with some providers competing with lower prices or even free services, rendering the exercise moot, he said. And such activity is likely to invite antitrust probes, he said. And charging content providers, moreover, likely will “stir up a hornet’s nest” of discord over access rights and neutrality issues bound to land in court, Mercer said. The “balance of power lies with net neutrality now,” he said: ISPs will have trouble making prioritization stick. One way or the other, he added, “the legal profession will do well out of any dispute.”