Industry whispers heard by ISPreview suggest that BT may be preparing to penalise some ISP's for revealing too much information in their broadband availability checkers. The move is likely to target any provider publishing the Virtual Path (VP) data of BT's wholesale network too openly.

Broadband ADSL is a contended "best efforts" network and as a result customers share their bandwidth with other users on the same exchange. Part of the path this information takes (from DSLAM over the ATM backhaul) is known as the Virtual Path.

However it's understood that the publishing of such information, specifically where anybody can view the VP data of any exchange, may actually be in breach of BT's Data Protection terms. We do not believe this will impact providers where a customer can only check the VP data of the exchange they're on.

Unfortunately it's expected that some ISP's allowing too much open access to the details may suddenly find certain special tools removed from their use, possibly without being given much warning.