| Posted: Thursday 11th March 2004 by
Sam |
BT Retail received a lot of criticism last week when it announced its new "Broadband Basic" package for £19.99 per month, with a 1GB download limit attached. They even managed to annoy Tiscali with an advert about Tiscali's 150K "broadband" services.
Not to be outdone though, Tiscali have announced that they too will be launching a new broadband service. This will offer either 50 hours online or 1GB data transfer per month. Exceeding the limit will cost you 2p per minute, or 2p per megabyte. And there's more good news - Tiscali are capping the monthly bill to a maximum of £50. It is also worth keeping in mind that this package is only available on DataStream enabled exchanges (which accounts for approximately 80% of the UK's enabled exchanges).
It is unclear what the setup costs for this service area. The BT package announced last week forced potential users to pay £80 for activation and a modem, taking the annual cost to only £4 less than BT Yahoo!'s premium service.
The full story can be found at The Register. Another interesting read about the same story is available at UK-Bug.
Personally, I think that this is ridiculous. This tops both BT's and Supanet's offerings in terms of poor pricing and lack of market research.
Plus Net received a good deal of press last week after BT's announcement, so you'd have thought that Tiscali might have taken that into account before launching this. Plus Net have been offering 512Kbps un-capped broadband for £18.99 per month for the best part of 2 years now.
Similarly, Metronet have been very successfully selling Pay-as-you-go broadband for quite some time. The reason their system has been successful though is that their offerings start at £11.75 per month, and are capped at a maximum of £28, which is not an unreasonable price anyway.
Yes, there is definately a place for Pay-as-you-go and low-priced broadband services. The likes of Metronet and Plus Net have proved that. However, I seriously hope we do not see many more of these ill-conceived packages that have been announced lately. At the moment they offer very poor value for money when you compare them to what has already been on the market for 18 months.
(Still no news on today's RFS dates I'm afraid - sorry!) |