I can just imagine the wailing from the UK ISPs whining about this crowding the UK's limited bandwidth - in fact haven't they started already.....and this well before this idea becomes anything like a reality?

The net speeds available in the UK are probably too slow nationwide to make this a possibility outside of a handful of the largest cities.

Sadly until we step up and go for something like Swedens 100mb connections I just don't see how we can truly have proper on-demand TV services - nevermind HD TV services.

BT ought to have been given the go-ahead to implement their national strategic communications plan & 'fibre-optic' the nation when we had the chance.....but sadly Thatcher's economic dogma got in the way & we're paying for that now.
She refused, privatised BT & now it's unlikely in the extreme that private companies would or even could carry out such a project 'in the national interest' (as opposed to their own mere private profit).

This will take hold when it becomes more affordable for the avg wage earner.

Reality is, to get a good picture at a decent resolution and still have some internet left to be of any use your going to need an 8meg pipe and upwards.

Heres another problem, virtually no one apart from the inner cities where fiber or cable is abundant can even get above 8meg and then its expensive.

And yet another problem, BT should have shot the dead horse that was dsl in the foot years back and just spent all the development money putting us in a fibe infrastructure that could have lasted us decades as hughjars said.

I belive BT worked closely with BELL technologies to create DSL, however soon as BELL got their working they waved bye bye to BT who i belive finnished the project on their own. Which would explain why it doesnt as well.

so we ended up with ADSL, and its not like proper dsl like most of the rest of the world we have to put up with asynchronous.

What makes it worse is most of the ADSL providers will lie through their teeth to make more money out of you, i have not lost count of the amount of people i have meet who have say had 1 meg upgraded say 4 meg or even possibly 8 meg. To only find out that their local exchange was either never 8meg enabled so it was impossible for them to get the full speed they were paying for. Im most cases its they are paying for 4 but still only receiving one due to transmission distance.

Half the time the DSL provides also send out their adaptor with excessivly high mtu settings which can cause slowness on routing, most people i meet notice a better increase from setting the mtu properly over paying BT an extra £100 a year for something you cant really get.