Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
 
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A hectic week (30 April 2000)

On Wednesday 26 April 2000 BT Openworld, BT's newly formed retail Internet business, announced its commercial broadband Internet service. For home users, the monthly price is £39.99pcm inclusive of VAT for unlimited unmetered access: business users will pay slightly more and, if you sign up before 30 June 2000, the £150 connection fee is waived.

The ADSL modem will give you 512Kb/sec downstream, 128Kb/sec upstream data transfer speed - roughly 10 times faster than a telephone modem.

There has been a great deal of comment on our mailing list and to us personally following the announcement. The main themes coming up are:

  • The services cost less than was thought; previous rumours suggested £50pcm for the home service.

  • Some are unhappy about the home service requiring a USB connection, rather than an Ethernet card, and being (at least officially) restricted to Windows 98 or 2000.

  • It is not clear whether technically straightforward connection sharing will be possible.

  • Those out of the range of the service are, for the moment, stymied: BT has provided a phone number and postcode checker so you can find out whether you may be able to receive the service.

  • That said, most correspondents are reasonably happy although the devil is in the detail: in particular, what services, if any, are blocked and what effect the contention ratio has.

The release date is 29 June 2000. BT Openworld is not the first commercial broadband Internet service for home users in this country, as NTL and Telewest have begun to roll out cable modems in their franchise areas, but BT has evidently changed tack and decided to offer the service widely and quickly.

Not clear at the moment is what other Internet Service Providers considering ADSL, such as Demon and Direct Connection, will do. At the moment anyone wanting to offer ADSL buys a wholesale broadband product from BT then adds their own services on top; will others be able to price their own services at an initial loss, as BT Openworld is doing?

On Friday 28 April, OFTEL announced that BT has formally agreed to accept a new condition on its license. This mandates unbundling of its local loop so that, by 1 July 2001, BT will be obliged to rent lines to other telecommunications operators and to give them access to install equipment in its exchanges. This will provide direct competition for BT Openworld, with organisations other than BT offering wholesale broadband products for anyone interested to take up.

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