Geoff Bennett, director of product marketing at digital optical internet firm Infinera, said it was hard for ISPs to justify their actions.

“Traffic ‘throttling’ was previously used to control a small minority of subscribers intent on abusing fair-use policies with – often illegal – peer-to-peer file sharing,” Bennett.

“However, the iPlayer is a highly popular, high-bandwidth service that’s also completely legal – which makes it harder to justify this type of action.”

Bennet said ISPs were caught between a rock and a hard place.

“On the one hand there is the pressure from both content providers and consumers to deliver high quality online services, and on the other, they are being squeezed in a fiercely competitive market that won’t tolerate heavy price increases,” he said.

“With the prospect of having to self-fund extra bandwidth capacity to accommodate growth, while at the same time offering ‘unlimited’ broadband without bankrupting themselves, the last thing that’s needed is the threat of public blacklisting.”

Bennett suggested should “take a more consultative approach with ISPs”, rather than “resorting to sensationalist threats”.