| Posted: Friday 16th April 2004 by
Sam |
Hot on the heels of an announcement by BT Wholesale to service providers on Wednesday, both UK-Bug and ADSLGuide are dishing the dirt on BT's new capacity charging system. UK-Bug goes on to mention two new IPStream based products as well. ADSLGuide also discusses a usage based charging system, although it now appears that this is unlikely to come any time soon.
The above two sites have already covered the issue well, so I'll just summarise the main points that can be taken from them.
Capacity charging system
- The different ADSL rates (512K, 1Mbit, 2Mbit) all cost the ISP the same monthly base rate of £8.40 ex VAT per month (This isn't to say that consumers will necessarily be charged this rate).
- ISP's rent BT Central pipes from BT Wholesale over which data between them and their customers is carried. The BT Central rental costs will increase significantly with the new capacity charging system. What's more, you cannot put capacity charged customers on standard priced BT Central pipes. The ISP must fork out the extra for the capacity charging central pipe. Depending on the habbits of users, this could lead to an increase or decrease of costs to ISPs. It plays rather nicely for BT though, as the risk of users hogging bandwidth is no longer their problem with the capacity charging system
- Documents seen by UK-Bug which detail the expected central pipe usage base their figures on Home 500 users using 23Kbps constantly and Home 1000 users using 73Kbps constantly. Whilst we realise that this may average out well over the period of a day, at peak times these could cause contention issues.
- The wholesale connection fee of £50 ex VAT will be carried over to the new capacity charging products it seems.
- The new pricing system is expected to come into effect in late May (reportedly the 28th).
IPStream Home 250 and 2000 products
UK-Bug also discuss two new IPStream based products from BT Wholesale. These are known as IPStream Home 250 and IPStream Home 2000. Rather unsurprisingly, the Home 250 package is a 256Kbps product, and the Home 2000 one is a 2Mbps product. Standard wholesale pricing for the two products is listed as being £12.25 monthly ex VAT for the Home 250 product and £38 monthly ex VAT for the Home 2000 product. Apparently these products will also be included in the new capacity charging system, although they are not due to even begin trialling until the summer.
In my opinion this new pricing option will complement the existing unmetered system very well. It will allow for many more ISPs to branch into the market which Metronet has dominated in for so long. This should at least prove popular in increasing broadband uptake among those who cannot justify or afford the current unmetered prices. |