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BT undercuts Virgin on super-fast broadband

by Scott Bicheno on 21 January 2010, 12:12

Tags: Virgin (NASDAQ:VMED), British Telecom (LON:BT.A)

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To Infinity and beyond

The battle for the UK ‘super-fast' broadband market started in earnest today, as BT revealed the pricing for its Infinity service, which offers download speeds of up to 40Mbps. BT is going head-to-head with Virgin Media for the next generation customer, with Virgin having launched its up to 50Mbps XXL service over a year ago.

Clearly BT needs to offer Infinity for at most 80 percent of the price of Virgin's XXL package to account for the download speed discrepancy, but BT has chosen to replicate the ‘standard' and ‘Full Monty' pricing models used by Virgin.

The full details are shown in the table below, and BT has undercut Virgins prices of £28 and £33 per month by more than 20 percent. Another advantage BT is keen to draw attention to is the upload speed of up to 10Mbps in Option 2. BT claims Virgin's best effort is 1.5Mbps.

BT says the service will be made available to 4 million homes and businesses by the end of the year, but the roll-out will begin next Monday. It has already committed to making super-fast broadband available to 40 percent of the country by the 2012 Olympics.

 

 

 

Option

Option 1

Option 2

Standard price per month

£19.99

£24.99

Connection charge

£50

Free

Download Speed

Up to 40Mb/s

up to 40Mb/s

Upload Speed

Up to 2Mb/s

Up to 10Mb/s

Monthly usage allowance

20GB

Unlimited

Wireless router

Free BT Home Hub

  Free BT Home Hub   

Contract Period

18 months

18 months

Security

Basic security

Advanced security

Storage

5GB Digital Vault

5GB Digital Vault with auto back-up

Wi-fi minutes

250 minutes

unlimited minutes

 



HEXUS Forums :: 36 Comments

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Excellent stuff!
Option 2 is unlimited huh? I'm assuming there will be some kind of traffic shaping or something of the kind applied to it though?
20GB limit :\
roadie
Option 2 is unlimited huh? I'm assuming there will be some kind of traffic shaping or something of the kind applied to it though?
You betcha, but I survived on BT before with traffic shaping, and I could do now with 40mb/s down and 10mb/s up.
If it has traffic management then it isnt as good as VM as their XXL package is free from such limitations. I hate VM for TM but in some respects they do provide value for money and it is pretty clear how they go about doing traffic management. If BT have a clear listing just like VM and its acceptable (like 10gb during day? unlimited night) then I wont mind cause the price is very good and best of all…. the upload is amazing compared with VM which is pants :D.