There has  been much discussion of late about the effect of new multimedia services on Internet traffic loads and who should pay for the extra network capacity needed to meet the growth in traffic.

In the UK the discussions have been centred around the BBC’s popular iPlayer service which lets users download or stream TV programmes to a PC. The BBC has said that its iPlayer service is accounting for between 3 and 5 per cent of all Internet traffic in Britain. According to figures from UK regulator Ofcom it will cost Internet Service Providers in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.

So who pays? Should it be the consumer with metered charges, or the content provider? Or should ISPs absorb the cost of extra capacity?

PTT isn’t going to answer that but we can tell you about the technologies that give consumers access to those bandwidth-hungry services. We have just released two brand new e-learning courses about the provision of ADSL and VDSL broadband services over copper wires. These courses join our existing course which discusses how even more bandwidth can be provided using FTTH or FTTC optical fibre systems. More about these three courses here .

We also offer a course covering the provision of IPTV services over broadband – more here .