| Posted: Thursday 27th May 2004 by
Sam |
BT have announced a wholesale reduction in Datastream pricing of £1 per month. The change, effective as of June 1st, means that ISP's will now be charged £74.60 per year per Datastream line. The announcement to Ofcom can be found here.
In addition to this, BT's new capacity charging product goes live tomorrow (May 28th). Until now ISP's using IPStream connections have been unable to receive accurate information about end-user bandwidth usage, thus making any capacity or usage based charging impossible. However, newmediazero are reporting that improvements to BT's accounting system (which we can only assume to be RADIUS based) allow accurate and detailed usage information to be reported back to the ISP.
Since the details of the capacity charging system first leaked 6 weeks ago, there has been much discussion about its benefit to end-users. Some herald it as the way forward for broadband in the UK, allowing cheaper products, more akin to the Pay-As-You-Go dialup products we all used just a few years ago. Others see it as a step backwards and believe that it signifies the begininning of the end of unmetered broadband access.
Either way, we can expect ISP's to reveal new products based upon the capacity charging system within the next few days. Whether these aid take-up or only increase confusion remains to be seen. |