The Changing Face of Broadband

[andrewducker]

Currently most people on broadband are charged for the capacity of their connection - 512MB is cheaper than 1MB which is cheaper than 2MB, etc. This is changing - more and more ISPs have realised that due to the way they are charged it's actually easier to give everyone the fastest connection possible (up to 2MB) and then charge them for usage (which is what they pay the most for). BT,for instance, are charging between £15 and £27 depending on whether you want 1GB or 30GB per month. Freedom2Surf are charging £15 for 2GB, £25 for 50GB and £47 for 'all you can eat'. The likes of trashcanglam will undoubtably remain on the "I download lots of video" plans, but for those people that just use email and occasionally pop to Amazon, I suspect the cheaper plans will look increasingly iinviting.

Comments

[sweinberg.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. I know nothing about the 'degrees' of broadband. Let's say I'm paying about 50 schwacks a months for Comcast cable internet. How ripped off am I being?

[andrewducker]

Well, that's about three Yen nowadays, due to your exchange rate, so that's pretty good.

Depending on how fast it is.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

And people who work from home and may have to down or upload large chunks of data from time to time will also benefit from connection speed plans :)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Or you could pay £21/month (inc VAT) for 1Mb/s unlimited with ADSL4LESS: http://www.adsl4less.com/offer/ with works out at about 302GB per month (if you downloaded continuously).

Compared to other western countries we are being royally screwed by companies like BT that usetheir monopoly control over the nations telecoms network to hold back broadband by squeezing every last drop of blood they can out of consumers. Me bitter? Naah

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Also for £40/month you can get 8Mb/s (1MB/s woo!) broadband, although there is a 500GB limit which makes it similar in some respects to a 2Mb/s connection.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

If you like pay-as-you-go broadband you might like Metronet: http://www.metronet.co.uk/

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

Until more ISPs provide accurate up-to-the-minute stats so you can see what you've used, and unless they can disregard inflated usage caused by other rogue users (imagine if a few thousand compromised zombie machines DOSed your IP address by mistake for a few hours, or even days - could be pretty expensive) I'll be steering well clear of pay-per-usage deals.