Today BT have announced, finally, that they will be cutting the cost of their R/ADSL broadband. The cost to ISPs will now be under £15 a month but the consumer will be paying £25-£30.
At the same time struggling NTL have announced that there will be a new 1 Mbps "Gold Tier" service offering 1024kbps down and 256kbps up stream, compared to the "Silver Tier" service this is a huge leap as that only achieved 512kbps down and 128kbps up stream. At first, they have said, this won"t be available everywhere the "Silver" service is, but eventually they hope to offer it to all their customers. More information will follow from NTL.
The changes to the R/ADSL price will take place on 1st April, and hopefully it will not be an April fools joke! The pricing isn"t unreasonable for competition from firms like Telewest, NTL and Tele2 but it does mean that many more people will use the BT service and how BT will cope is questionable. Their hopes are high at achieving a large number of customers but in order to cope their customer services and bandwidth will have to be improved. The chief executive of BT said today:
"We plan to hit one million ADSL broadband connections by summer 2003, a huge step up from today"s figure of 145,000 connections. We will drive for two million in 2004, and about 5 million by 2006 - which means a quarter of UK households connected to broadband within four years. We"re aiming high - and we need to."