ADSLGuide reports that BT Wholesale has begun talking to ISP's regarding its plans for a 'Downstream' Quality of Service (QoS) control on its IP Stream ADSL products. It's believed that such a trial would occur during the latter half of next year:

The QoS control is designed to provide an assured rate on the downstream side of the service, examples for its use would be to ensure a video stream plays smoothly with no stalls. The system will work such that the ISP interfaces to the BT Wholesale systems and books the session, i.e. what bit rate and for how long it is required.

One can envisage the situation, whereby you have an ISP supplying a Video On Demand service running at perhaps 1.5Mbps, the user decides to watch the movie, and the speed of the line is boosted to 2Mbps, and the QoS switched on. The end-user doesn't have to worry about the techie bits, they have simply paid their £2.50 to view the film.

Such options would probably see greatest demand among users of standard speed broadband connections (512Kbps), although we can’t help but wonder how they’d govern the ‘line quality’ aspect (not everybody can go faster).

Mind you, BT would probably be better off concentrating on increasing its overall broadband speeds, much as cable operators have been doing along with some LLU xDSL providers.