New Capped Services Launched (06 Mar 2004)

BT & Telewest to offer budget broadband

This week has seen the announcement from BT and Telewest of two alternative "no frills" broadband services.

BT are to offer a 512k service, with a monthly cap of 1GB for £19.99. This allows only 5 hours of full speed access use a month, or only a measly 15 minutes a day! This is quite appalling.

Telewest will offer a 250k service with a daily 750MB limit, for £17.99 if you have other Telewest services or £19.99 if you do not. This allows you to download for a much more reasonable 6-7 hours a day, albeit at half the speed of BT's package.

We welcome the development of alternative broadband services, widening the choice for UK customers. Both ISPs also have alternative uncapped offerings (BT Broadband may also have a cap, on which the ntl policy is said to have been based, but they do have the uncapped BT Openworld/Yahoo offering too). Therefore, unlike the one size fits all ntl capped packages, customers of BT and Telewest have a choice as to what level of service to take to suit their needs. AntiCap leaves it to customers to decide if the new offerings reflect value for money when compared to other ISP's offerings.

Our objectives acknowledge that where ISPs do impose limits they must be readily apparent. Both BT and Telewest have launched these new services clearly identifying their cap policy. We trust that their advertising will continue to show this.

AntiCap is thus primarily concerned as to whether the use limits are appropriate, given that broadband is supposed to be an "always on" and thus by definition an always useable service.

Telewest's daily use allowance, for a "budget" service, would appear reasonable (after all ntl's capped one size fit's all 600k service allows only 5-6 hours use while their 1Mbps service allows perhaps only 2.5 hours).

BT's offering gives a derisory amount of use in a day. If all the BT budget user wishes to do is to check their email occasionally, and perhaps their lottery results, fair enough. But, do you really need broadband for this? The BT offering will not allow the customer to expand their use, as their understanding grows, to take advantage of broadband's potential. As the customer becomes exposed to the online community, expectations will grow. The impact of all the inevitable patch downloads of the essential antivirus, firewall, spamwasher and windows bloatware can't be underestimated.

We believe this BT limit is excessively low and makes the product unusable. It must not be the future of UK broadband.

*time on line is calculated assuming the service speed is able to run at the full quoted speed.