| Posted: Tuesday 1st June 2004 by
Sam |
Eclipse Internet have today launched a new range of ADSL services that offer flexible bandwidth to end users. Customers are charged a flat monthly rate and can temporarily increase their speed by "FLEX"ing - for a small hourly charge. There is no monthly data usage cap on any of the products.
The following table depicts the new pricing structure.
| Product | Access plan | Flex speeds | Price | Price of Flex
(per hour) | | FLEX Home | Home 250
Home 500
Home 1000 | Up to 1Mbs
Up to 1Mbs
N/A | £17.99
£23.95
£37.95 | From 5p
From 9p
N/A | | FLEX Business | Business 250
Business 500
Business 1000 | Up to 1Mbs
Up to 1Mbs
N/A | £17.99
£23.95
£37.95 | From 5p
From 11p
N/A | | FLEX Business Plus | Business Plus 500
Business Plus 1000
Business Plus 2000 | Up to 2Mbs
Up to 2Mbs
N/A | £37.60
£61.10
£96.35 | From 19p
From 26p
N/A |
All prices above include VAT at 17.5%.
The new FLEX service is based upon the capacity based charging system which was launched on Friday. Because there is no difference in price between provisioning a 250Kbps line and a 2Mbps line, Eclipse will provision the fastest possible speed that your line can take. They then throttle it to the service you select, allowing you to boost it back up when you want. The idea is simple, and has received a lot of positive attention so far. It's interesting to note that the new IPStream Home 250 product makes a debut in the pricing here too. This has not been officially announced by BT Wholesale, although details of it leaked some time ago.
BT Wholesale will eventually be replacing their current fixed-rate pricing scheme with the capacity based charging one (and possibly also a usage based charging one too). As a result, all ISP's will have to do exactly the same, so you can expect lots of announcements in the not-too-distant future!
In my view, these products are very innovative (even though BT Retail have been planning something similar) and make a refreshing change from the recent flood of capped low-speed services. The best of both worlds has been incorporated into one product - the people who want low speeds can opt for 250Kbps and increase it when they want, whilst the people who want 1Mbps can have that too - without having to worry about usage limits. I suspect that Eclipse will be adding a 2Mbps option to the Home services when BT Wholesale launch Home 2000 later this year.
A detailed FAQ for the new FLEX services can be found here.
(Apologies for the being so late to post this - I was stuck in an exam)
|