Charles Dunstone certainly has an eye for publicity. The head of Carphone Warehouse (and of its "free" broadband service TalkTalk) last week threw back the request from the BPI, which represents the music industry, that TalkTalk begin implementing the "three strikes and you're out" policy. This is the policy mooted to tackle people who download (well, perhaps upload too; or upload only; it's not clear) copyrighted material they don't own.

That's not surprising. The request from the BPI warns of "injunctions" if internet service providers (ISPs) don't implement the policy within two weeks, but the concept is still hopelessly unclear. Who will pay if a high-powered barrister finds his or her connection cut off due, say, to something a passing hacker using their open Wi-Fi or a security hole in their machine has allowed? Will it be the ISP or the BPI in the dock?

Dunstone wants to avoid that; he'll let the BPI and the file-sharer slug it out, as they have been doing. Threats from the music business cut little ice with him. As a source close to TalkTalk noted to me last week, gazing at the BPI's letter, the ISP business is bigger than the music business in this country.

Mad as hell

And anyway, ISPs have rather more pressing matters on their hands. Their problem isn't people doing illegal stuff. It's the ones doing absolutely legal things — specifically, watching BBC programmes on the broadcaster's iPlayer. This is pouring red ink all over their accounts, and they're mad as hell about it.

What's happening is this: people are going directly to the iPlayer page and watching programmes. They're not using the peer-to-peer version; too much hassle, and it uses up too much processing power. Here are the latest figures, covering the first month of operation.

ISPs noticed the difference at once. PlusNet blogged about the fact that by late February, iPlayer traffic was already making up 5% of its network traffic. That's one outlet.

The reason why this scares ISPs is that most of them get their connectivity via BT's IPStream product, where they pay per gigabyte consumed. Streaming sites consume a lot more data than "normal" sites. Which means iPlayer whacks them hard in the streaming pocket. PlusNet estimated that it pushes up streaming costs from £17,200 per month to £51,700 per month — an increase from 6.1p/user to 18.3p/user.

In other words, the cost per user trebled in the first month of the service.

Blocked pipe

And did your broadband bill go up? Nope. Telco 2.0 commented that the iPlayer "blows up" the standard ISP model. IPStream comes with 155-megabit pipes. Watching iPlayer consumes about 500 kilobits per second. Get just 300 people watching iPlayer at once on an ISP and that's its IPStream pipe filled — and forget about anyone else.

What to do? Some of the ISPs have suggested that the BBC might like to, you know, contribute to their neighbourhood fat pipe security watch; because it would be an awful thing if something, well, happened to the data coming over on port 1935 (used for iPlayer data).

The BBC's Ashley Highfield, head of future media and technology, last week riposted that ISPs should put their own houses in order, suggesting that "unlimited broadband" should mean just that, not "slowed down when you approach a limit" and that the use of "up to" should be banned in ads. He also offered to name and shame ISPs that tried to charge content providers. "If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and what content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy."

Sauce for the goose

Which is fair enough. (Perhaps the ISPs might respond that if Highfield feels like telling them what to do, they've got some suggestions about fewer repeats and reality shows.)

But there's a definite sense of what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. ISPs are in one breath telling one content provider that they're just the conduit down which the data passes, so they don't want to get involved if the content provider thinks the data passing is bad. But on the other, the ISPs are annoyed by all this data coming from another content provider, and want it to contribute something to their costs.

They can't both be right. I wonder which argument ISPs will deploy in the long run: working with the BPI, or paying for new 155-megabit lines from BT? Neither will come cheap.