BT undercuts Virgin on super-fast broadband

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.