BSkyB was been warned by the BBC that it could soon be facing charges to carry BBC television signals across its networks, after retransmission fee talks between the two companies broke down.
Currently, BSkyB charges the BBC and other terrestrial TV channels for carrying their broadcasts on its network, with the BBC paying £5m for the privilege while other channels together are thought to pay £5m.
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But with talks hitting an impasse, the BBC is now considering turning the tables and charging BSKyB.
"This free ride has to stop," said John Tate, director of policy and strategy at the BBC.
But a BSkyB spokesperson responded by stating that "the BBC directly benefits from the billions of pounds we've invested in our TV platform and the technical services that support the 49 channels they run over the Sky platform," before describing the payments as "no different to paying for electricity, studio facilities or any other operational costs".
BSkyB is said to be meeting culture minister Ed Vaizey, who has previously advised the company to axe fees, later this week.
BSkyB has also announced a £49m, five-year deal with Virgin Media Business that will further bolster its backhaul network capacity with a point to point connection of 10Gbps.
With the companies hoping to have the network in place by the end of 2013, the plan is for Virgin to connect around a third of Sky's unbundled local exchanges with its wholly owned nationwide broadband network.
"Whilst we're concentrating on developing better services for the public in our consumer division, we also believe that our high capacity network is ideally placed to provide the underlying infrastructure that can help other providers with their backhaul capacity needs," said managing director of Virgin Media Business, Tony Grace.
