BT to lower wholesale DSL tariffs, increase speeds to 8 Mbps

bealtine

BT to lower wholesale DSL tariffs, increase speeds to 8 Mbps

BT Wholesale unveiled plans to deliver higher speed broadband services throughout the UK together with a range of wholesale broadband pricing initiatives. BT plans to deliver higher speeds from its wholesale ADSL products to meet increasing demand for more bandwidth-hungry applications such as video. Trials are scheduled to begin in April 2005 with a view to launching higher speed services nationally from the autumn. Firstly the company plans to trial upping the speeds on lines that will currently support existing 2Mps ADSL services to deliver speeds between 2Mbps and 8Mbps dependant on line characteristics. In addition BT Wholesale plans to run initial trials of ADSL2+ technology to support higher speed services of up to 18Mbps.
From April, BT Wholesale plans to reduce the wholesale cost to service providers of BT IPStream ADSL products by an average of about 8 percent in areas where there is a combination of high customer demand, high take up and lower costs. The reduction will be delivered as a rebate to the service provider of GBP 1.10 per BT IPstream Home end user and GBP 1.40 per BT IPstream Office and S product end user. BT will also reduce the costs for BT Datastream ADSL service providers at the same time to ensure continued compliance with the regulatory margin rule.
The company plans further price cuts for Local Loop Unbundling operators. BT would hope to cut the monthly rental on the fully unbundled local loop product by a similar proportion to the BT IPstream reduction. This will be subject to the speedy and satisfactory conclusion of two related Ofcom consultations and the wider review as well as following normal regulatory processes.

Delphi91

Any chance we could encourage BT to do an Eircom buy-out????

Although given the crap network that we have over here, they probably wouldn't touch us with a barge pole!

Mike

Praetorian

Brits in, brits in!

bminish

Delphi91 wrote:

Any chance we could encourage BT to do an Eircom buy-out????
Mike

It's not BT we want, it's the UK regulator. If BT were operating under comreg the UK situation would look a lot worse.

.Brendan

damien

Delphi91 wrote:

Any chance we could encourage BT to do an Eircom buy-out????

Uhm, they bought Esat and Ocean and well ....

The Reg is reporting now that they decided to lower prices for resellers whereever LLU is happening. A clever trick to make it more economical for people to just resell their wholesale service and not unbundle.

Urban Weigl

damien.m wrote:

The Reg is reporting now that they decided to lower prices for resellers whereever LLU is happening. A clever trick to make it more economical for people to just resell their wholesale service and not unbundle.

Technically, all they are doing is offering additional discounts on the most popular exchanges. Those are also the exchanges that are most likely to get unbundled, so in effect the result will be that other ISP's are going to think twice before unbundling.

Just a thought, but is unbundling truly the most efficient solution? Here in Ireland, many people hope that it will result in increased competition, and thus translate into more and better broadband services. However, if the regulator is strong, would it not be more efficient to instead let other ISP's resell the service, providing their own value added services and backhaul of course. Of course, a good regulator is required (which we don't have here).