Ah yes, the good old copper wire, the last mile for data to travel into the good British peoples homes. Fine when that data is telephone signals of Aunty Pat wishing you a happy birthday. Not so good for transferring a whole series of television programs, films, news bulletins, Pod Casts and anything else internet users wish to watch.

ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) have been struggling to increase their bandwidth (the amount of data they can transmit) since the internets shaky beginnings at the end of the last century. When Stockholm was enjoying 10mbit connections us Brits were showing a stiff upper lip while making do with 0.5mbits; doesn’t it make you proud.

Now it appears 100mbits is the continents target and Gordon Brown, the charismatic, forward thinking, entrepreneur we know him to be doesn’t want to allow us to become uncompetitive. ‘Let them eat cake!’ he demanded while Blogging in his underpants behind the protest proof windows of number ten.

The BBC seems to agree, as does almost every other content provider on the internet. The BBC iPlayer has been a huge success allowing users to logon to the bbc.co.uk/iplayer website and view TV shows from the last seven days. Yahoo! owned Flicker is now offering video which is a big diversification for them as a traditionally photo sharing website. Google too are in on the act with their buyout of YouTube last year.

These fantastic services are where the web has always been heading. From the days of QuickTime movies loading painstakingly slowly in popup windows to the smooth streaming of You’ve Been Framed style clips on YouTube. The web has been edging its way to a vision similar to that of the company Joost. Joost have teamed up with program makers such as Endemol to provide the means to transfer their content over the web.

Joost owners use their experience of developing P2P file transfer protocols and applications such as Kazaa and Skype to provide large video downloads while reducing initial server investment. The idea being that the movies and shows users download are temporarily stored on their PC’s and then sent to other users; thus decentralising the data distribution and therefore the demands on the Joost servers. Clever hey?!

However that still leaves ISP such as BT and Virgin Media with the challenge of dealing with all this data and getting it to users as quickly as possible. Whilst upgrading telephone exchanges has always been a priority and the last mile a challenge that the ISP’s appreciate rests at their door. They are unwilling to invest the vast amounts of money required to upgrade Britons aging and chaotic copper wire infrastructure, especially with no financial support from the content providers coining in on the advertising revenue generated by the high user uptake of this new medium of broadcasting.