Speed fest
UK telco giant BT has moved aggressively to counter the threat posed by Vigin Media by more than doubling the bandwidth for its domestic and business broadband customers at no extra cost.
BT Total Broadband customers will now get ‘up to' 20Mbps (megabits per second) instead of the previous 8Mbps. Upload speeds have also doubled to 1Mbps.
These new, faster speeds will only be available through 549 exchanges initially, however, and thus will only apply to 40 percent of the country. BT is hoping to improve this coverage to 55 percent by March 2010. You can check what your maximum speed is using BT's broadband speed test.
To further ingratiate itself to its broadband customers, BT is also offering the BT Broadband Accelerator to them for only the cost of postage and packing: £1.20. BT claims it reduces the impact of electrical interference and can increase broadband speed by 1.5Mbps. You can find out more about the BT Broadband Accelerator here.
"The BT Broadband Accelerator can make a big difference to the speed of your broadband. We think it is so important we've taken the decision to offer it to our customers for just the cost of the postage," said John Petter, MD of BT's consumer division. "Between that and us more than doubling headline speeds for millions of homes and businesses, most customers should start to see a rapid boost in the performance of their connection."
