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Can you hear that high-pitched shrieking? That's the sound of dozens of ISPs wailing and gnashing their teeth following the BBC's announcement that iPlayer is now available on the Nintendo Wii.

Service providers were already becoming twitchy about the popularity of the BBC's TV on-demand service. According to them, users of the iPlayer are consuming so much bandwidth that they are hogging the network. The solution, they say, is for networks to be upgraded and for the BBC and content providers to contribute towards the bill. Ofcom puts the cost of upgrading nationally at £830 million.

The addition of the Wii version of the iPlayer is significant because, unlike most Macs and PCs, Wii boxes tend to sit in living rooms next to the main household television and are therefore a more convenient platform for accessing on-demand television. The same will be true of Apple TV if and when a version of the iPlayer eventually becomes available for it.

Predictably, the major bone of contention is who will pay for the upgrade. The ISPs believe the BBC is responsible for a significant additional load on their networks, and so should contribute towards the upgrade. The BBC says that the iPlayer will provide the ISPs with more customers and therefore, higher profits, so the ISPs should pay. Ofcom is sitting on a very broad fence hoping it all goes away. It won't.

While the BBC, through its former head of future media and technology

Like poking a wasp's nest with a stick, the ISPs response was predictable: 'There seems to be a lack of understanding about how networks are built. Either we are not explaining it properly or it is falling on deaf ears.' That was Simon Gunter of Tiscali, a company which seems to have failed to predict that its customers may actually want to use their broadband connection to do more than send the odd email and look up Wikipedia once in a while, despite the fact that it operates its own on-demand TV service. Surely its objection to the BBC's stance on iPlayer couldn't have anything to do with competition for Tiscali TV, could it?

From a customer's point of view, it seems that ISPs are quite happy to sell their broadband services to us on the basis of all the wonderful content and fun we can access online, yet as soon as we sign up they set about limiting that fun and whinging about anyone who tries to provide the kind of entertainment we expected from broadband.

What next? Asking Adobe to contribute to the upgrade cost because so many people are uploading photos to Photoshop Express? High bandwidth applications are here to stay. And, just in case ISPs don't yet get it, they are going to grow in popularity and in number. While total 'cloud' computing may be a long way off, thanks in part to the limitations Adam Banks points out in this issue's Escape, much more of the work we do and entertainment we consume will involve transferring large wads of data over the Internet. In other words, that £830 million upgrade will be necessary even if the iPlayer is terminated tomorrow. Asking the BBC to fork out for it is a bit like asking Mercedes Benz to pay for the cost of upgrading the road network.