Wired on Friday: If you've bought a Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360 console for Christmas, you'll be no doubt counting the days before you can rip it open and start playing the latest next-generation computer games.

Well, to the 12 days of Christmas, you might have to add another half hour or so of nailbiting tension. It's not the desperate struggle to find AA batteries that dogged ancient gameplayers: it'll be downloading online software updates.

All of these machines offer the capability to connect to the net - not to browse the web or to use e-mail, but to connect and play with other console-owners and to shop for yet more games. But Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all enforce mandatory downloads of software "upgrades" before you can connect to their online game services.

In the first few weeks of the Sony and Nintendo consoles going on sale, customers have been faced with regular, long download sessions. Over a broadband connection, the updates take 20 minutes or so to digest, with updates continuing into the future. The Xbox 360 has been around for over 18 months, and still regularly requires long firmware updates of games and the main Microsoft operating system.

Of course, you can play all of these machines without a net connection. Each of them is designed to work solo as well as online. But the same is true of a PC, and few of us would ever consider a computer locked off the net as being as powerful as one connected to the wider world.

All the consoles offer multiplayer gaming with other net players. Wii and Sony players can download new games. From last week, US Xbox 360 users can download TV shows and movies.

But even more than a PC, consoles are unhappy with dial-up, and really demand broadband. Even the cheap, cheerful Nintendo Wii needs a modern Wi-Fi internet connection to go online out of the box. Truly, these user-friendly family machines are as tied to the existence of a broadband internet connection as a desktop PC.

That may mean the growth of new console markets may be locked to the growth in internet broadband. And if you don't have broadband, upgrading to the latest console may be less tempting than ever before.

Reading through reviews of the new consoles among the affluent members of the developing world, for instance, you can see the irritation. Even though many in India and China now have the disposable income to spend on video games, tech reviewers in India couldn't see the point of moving from the last generation PS2 to the modern game platform when there was little chance of online connection, and no high-definition televisions to watch the fancier graphics. Without broadband, the upgrade path to the latest consoles could come screaming to a halt.

Or perhaps the causality will be reversed. It may be that consoles are the way to boost broadband. For now, the limiting factor on broadband adoption in countries like the US and Ireland has been the tardiness of incumbent phone companies and governments' tolerance of their slow rollout. But countries like Hong Kong, The Netherlands and South Korea are seeing the broadband market top out at around 75-80 per cent of households. That limitation is set by PC sales - there's been no reason to get broadband if you don't have a home computer.

Consoles have managed to penetrate further and gain wider, more frequent use than PCs in the homes of many. And in the markets where PCs have penetrated the least - lower income households, for instance - the console replaces them as the accompaniment to the television, cheap DVD player and mobile phone. Microsoft and Sony both see their consoles as becoming the "digital media centre" - a PC proxy that they see as replacing the television in the living rooms, not the home offices, of the masses.

Could it be that the last few percentage drops to be wrung out of broadband will come from households that don't even own a PC? If it does, and net-users shift from being laptop and PC jockeys to game and media devourers, it could represent a dramatic shift back to large companies like Microsoft and Sony.

Even though the Wii and PlayStation will offer standard web browsers, their manufacturers act as gatekeepers to their audience. No third parties can provide services to them without paying the go-between.

The PC-centric nature of the existing web means that most of it will be closed off to the console surfers: the only net they'll see is what their console's creators want them to see.

The battle between consumer freedom and what these companies would prefer you do with your media centre is already happening. Enterprising enthusiasts worked out a way to bypass the "Wii shop" on Nintendo's console and access the wider net for themselves, long before Nintendo's official web browser software was due to be made available.

Thanks to one of those long and compulsory software updates downloaded from Nintendo HQ, this accidental "feature" was patched over and removed. Owners of Sony's PlayStation Portable have fought a cat-and-mouse chase to run their own software on the machine, with each network upgrade blocking consumers' attempts to run their own programs, and bringing them back to only Sony-approved software.

The trouble is that dedicated consoles such as these don't provide their users with any option or control over what kind of net they use, and if they did, their manufacturers have so much control over them that it could be quickly eliminated.

That could be a result that would make a mockery of American politicians' current attempts to introduce "network neutrality" to internet providers to preserve competition and to prevent censorship online.

In the future, it may not be the ISPs who control what happens on the popular net - it may be those who control proprietary systems like the home consoles. And that's a game that's stacked in the dealers' favour.