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BT announces superfast pricing
BRITISH TELECOM (BT) has announced pricing for its new high speed broadband service, BT Infinity.
The Infinity service is aimed at consumers that enjoy a lot of media, stream things, and play online games, and it uses fibre optics to speed up net connections and download speeds. BT said that it will offer download speeds of up to 40Mbps from as little as £19.99 per month.
Not holding back on the details, at least when it came to its main competitors' services, BT said that this would lead to end-user savings of just under £8 a month from Virgin Media's most comparable offering. And then, while we were still working out what that £8 could be spent on, added that it was roughly six times faster than Virgin as well.
Gavin Patterson, chief executive officer at BT Retail, said, "The Internet is essential to our customers' lives and they are demanding more and more as richer and even more compelling services become available. BT Infinity gives customers the capacity and reliability they need in an instant and at a great value price they can afford. We want to give our customers the best possible online experience and are committed to rolling out super-fast speeds across the UK."
BT said that customers will be able to upgrade to the faster package from this Monday, if they are in an area where it is available. Business users can sign up for a similar offering, called Business Total Broadband Fibre, which also becomes an upgrade option on the 27th.
For consumers there are two pricing offers. One costs £19.99, and the other £24.99. As to be expected, they have subtle differences. For example, the cheaper option offers a 20GB per month download limit, while for a fiver more you get the fair-use 'unlimited' option.
The sub-twenty quid option also involves a £50 connection fee and gives 2Mbps upload speeds. The beefier option is free and gives users 10Mbps up. BT reckons that gamers will be able to play about 30 times faster using its service.
The launch follows trials in Muswell Hill and Glasgow, so hopefully it's worked out the kinks. µ
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dont forget the £50 setup fee they charge for just flicking a switch
If you actually read the info from BT, not the Inq's failed attempt at copy & paste, BT are claiming its 30% faster when playing games. Not 30x faster. Presumably this is mainly due to lower latency or the faster upload speed compared to other ADSL services.
we need to ditch the 'up to' classification and replace it with 'at least'
maybe then we can hold these pirates to account.
in the current system they could justifiably say "you get up to 8 peta bps speed" which is technically true - well its no less of a lie than "up to 8mbps"
BT have my love. 30x faster gaming, awethom!
So we are going to be getting 5x faster broadband for the same money as 3 years ago, and posters are mostly complaining about this.
Virgin only cover half the population, so it's just as well we're not relying on them. I'm surprised that they still have vast areas of London not cabled, considering the population density I would have expected this to be profitable.
In a building recession I would have thought Virgin could get the cable laying work done cheaper.
Virgin is not an option for half of us. All we have is BT and whoever buys their capacity and sells it on to us.
What's to stop me if I was running an ISP business getting one house running at a speed of 500Mbps and then sell it to the rest of Britain and then only get 4mbps? I don't understand how they're still getting away with it. What exactly is Ofcom doing?
I'm on Optical Virgin media on the 10Mb package and i get 9.9Mbs.
I tried Sky broadband but found I couldn't get more than 0.5Mbs how can you have fair competition when they are so incorrect
Yeah, it's like converting my quiet street into a motorway and then limiting the speed to 10MPH the whole area or in this case the entire network.
Some fake bullsh_t, 8Meg service 4.5meg connection with ONLY a 1.4meg actual download speed on a perfect time and day (off peak)... What a fuc*ing waste of electric and time! While P2P is throttled to 5-19KBPS download with 200KBPS during the night till 12-8am, what nonsense. I'm looking to sh*it on them and going with someone else soon. Damn shame virgin does something similar, was eyeing them but once i read their little smallprint and the part that says they have traffic management well don't want to go from sh*tter to sh*t or the other way around. And every other provider here in Mitcham, South London uses BT's bulls*it as they always need me to enter a BT number to see what speed i can get. What a waste of life, these SOB (sons of Bit*ches) don't even have their independent lines etc.
In other words, even if i move providers the old problems might be present still.
New plan now: download all the demos for the PS3 and waste/slow down the network until these retards at BT spend on their infrastructures and servers and switches etc. and not just lining their shareholders pockets. The demos will be deleted and re downloaded... 24hours 365... i have got to get my share of the paid bandwidth. These individuals are too selfish, they care only about themselves and non-else, small print is another word for deception and deception only to increase financially, which ultimately means that greed has been given birth to, one of the 7 destructive sins. Jesus said "follow the commandments" when he was told "I am following it but what now?" Jesus replied, "then sell your house, clothes, wealth and everything you owe and follow me, for I am The Way, Truth and Life and no one will go to Heaven unless they follow me"
I guess this can only mean where previously you would play for an hour, you now play for only two minutes. Must have become really boring...
I think they were comparing the upload speeds there - would be nice if the launch of Infinity persuaded VM to increase their rather misely upload speeds, because according to the Infinity site our street is expected to get 15Mb/s down and 6Mb/s upload speeds, and I'd seriously consider accepting a 3x cut in my download speeds if it meant getting a 4x increase in upload...
How is the new 40Mbps faster than Virgin? They offer 50Mbps now, and 100 and 200mbps in the future. 6x slower I believe is more correct.
TBF this news is more important for it's resellers really. Once the tech is in the exchanges they can sell it on and maybe someone will unbundle it (if that's an option?) and we can get something a lot closer to that "unlimited" misnomer they throw around these days.
BT can stick their service until they can give some actual values for 'heavy use'.
BT: http://preview.tinyurl.com/btfairuse
Virgin: http://preview.tinyurl.com/vfairuse
It's not cheaper than VM if you include the cost of the phone line.
Also, a 20Gb cap makes the service unsuitable for the purposes that BT claim.
Staggering that Inq didn't pull them up on this?
Nice to see BT are still into misleading and lying to their customers.
Left them in the 80's and would never consider going back. A bunch of lying chancers.
unlimited haha that word always makes me laugh in this context
over the years it will end up with an entirely new meaning thanks to the hollow promises of ISPs
word: unlimited
meaning: the flow of a given commodity throttled by the will of another person at a distant location
What's the point though? - 20gb of downloads can be used up in minutes, and their 'unlimited' package will be hamstrung by ridiculous FUP restrictions making it just as crap. Especially when you find yourself throttled through the floor every evening as a result. The odd thing is I< would pay more than they're talking about for a truely unlimited service and i doubt i'm alone.
The trading name 'British Telecom' hasn't been used for decades; it's just 'BT'. Still, at least journalists have stopped calling it 'the GPO'!
Couldn't agree more, this is little more than a press release re-write. Up to 40mb?? that's hardly a quantifyable figure, I have yet to see anyone get close to 8Mbps and I have installed a lot of ADSL home solutions from different providers. Virgin might cost a bit more but I have always got what I pay for, I notice there is no mention of what BT consider to be fair use, I bet their interpretation and mine differ greatly.
"BT reckons that gamers will be able to play about 30 times faster using its service"
What does this even mean?
That I can download a game faster than I could with a dial-up line? That I'll get less lag (which has nothing to do with raw bandwidth)?
Or that it was written by some marketing gonk who has no clue?
Your Inq journalist could also have stopped for a second and questioned this (and the rest of it) rather than re-writing BT's press release for them.