Capitalism and the market place are pretty powerful forces. We dont know how its going to look in a few years time.

Innovation and marketing can completely change around a system that is stagnant. ISPs are no different. Remember when Freeserve was launched? ISPs copying the business model exploded all over the place, when ADSL started out it was only BT, and then BT sold it as a wholesale product all the other ISPs got on board.

Then LLU came onstream. That market is now dominated by TalkTalk and Sky the latter only started offering broadband in 2006 and the former only really took off in the same year.

Who knows what will happen in the next few years. Sky for instance offer broadband not to make a profit on it, their price, quality and customer service are unrivalled, but to increase the numbers of their paid tv service and reduce the churn from people leaving.

I think they succeed because people are addicted to saving every last pound and seem to love to bundle themselves up in some mental long term phone/bb/tv package (where they can spread the profit amongst the services)

Personally, I don't bundle anything and pay the premium for choice, flexibility and decent customer care.

In 2000 if you told people you'd have 80mbit for £50 they would have torn your hand off, BT/TT prices of ~£26 are unreasonably low imo (cutting their own throats) but people just expect that now from all isps.

Edited by Magsy (Tue 22-May-12 14:42:58)

People say that staying with BT Wholesale gives you choice, but when it comes to unlimited fibre at an affordable price, staying with BT Wholesale only gives you a choice of one provider, BT.

Back in the old days I had AOL for years. I then switched to 'eclipse internet.' At that time it was quite small and was quite expensive comparatively. It had good reviews etc.

I had the worst ever experience with them and actually switched back to AOL (who then restricted me to something ridiculous like 20 kb/s at peak due to FUP).

Anyway moral of the story as I mentioned earlier is that the smaller ISPs does not automatically mean better. I do agree that customer service is usually better at the small ISPs but definitely with eclipse they were unable to swallow any charges.

At the time they wanted me to pay upfront for an engineer before crediting it to my bill... Comparatively Sky told me straight up 'there will be no charge as you are in the master socket.'

Sky do fibre now too which is good. No throttling of torrents etc. I pay £20 plus line rental and get full speeds 24/7. That's only for 40/2 though. 80/20 is £30.

I have to say I have been shocked by how expensive fibre is overall. I had 15mbps for £7.50 before. I now have 40mbps for £20. Thing is my usage has not increased. It feels like the first days of broadband when we were billed by speed when actually ISPs are billed according to usage.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

I have to say I have been shocked by how expensive fibre is overall. I had 15mbps for £7.50 before. I now have 40mbps for £20. Thing is my usage has not increased. It feels like the first days of broadband when we were billed by speed when actually ISPs are billed according to usage.

I don't think the price for fibre is too bad at all. In 2002 I was paying £29.99 for 512Kb broadband and am now paying £26 for 80/20Mbps (160x faster at a lower cost).

If you want to see high pricing take a look at the Verizon Fios products in the U.S. It is FTTP but the pricing is much higher than BT FTTP.

I think it's not bad pricing overall...

But compared to how cheap LLU products had become it's quite expensive.
For those who are seeing significant improvements e.g. 1mbps to 80mbps price-wise it's not too bad.

For those syncing at high speeds already it seems quite pricey.

You aren't forced. If you don't agree there are a lot of other ISPs around to choose from.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

As the title. i notice that Talk Talk, sky and Bt are a lot cheaper than smaller ISps, how can they do this?

Any ISP is free to pick their price.

I know that they may have more customers, but to offer unlimited for a few quid more than normal seems to be impossible.

Why? There's nothing complicated about it. A connection is a connection. You've maybe been fooled into thinking bandwidth is terribly expensive. In reality it isn't. You can download terabytes if you desire on ADSL24's fibre service. They just force you to do it at particular times of day. BT allow you to do it whenever you wish - as any sensible ISP should.

How Bt retail can do the higher speed for the same price as the lower speed I don't know, i suppose it helps when you are all one company.

Speed is essentially irrelevant. If you want 40GB usage you can pay £18 or whatever it is. If you want "unlimited" pay £26. If you live in an ADSL only area that's just bad luck.

We are going back to the old days, where smaller ISPs will be forced out because they can't compete.

Nonsense. There are dozens of ISPs to choose from. BT Group has about half the market which seems reasonable to me given their investment.

Even if i did go for fibre, there is no way i would pay a £100 connection fee, no offence ADSL24, but that is over priced, i would have to go for one of the larger providers and then there is only one I would go for and that would not be a great choice either.

Choices eh...doesn't sound like ISPs being "forced out" to me. You're making a decision based on what you value the service at. If you decide not to pay that's up to you.

Thankfully at the moment i am happy with what I got and will not be going fibre when it comes here around the end of next month, but I know a few people who are thinking of it and some of them are with the smaller ISPs and will go to Sky, Bt and even Talk Talk because they are cheaper.

Maybe people choose these ISPs because they offer a decent service at the right price?

ADSL in the UK which launched in 2000 was ALWAYS available as wholesale. In 1998 and 1999 the trials were small (i..e a few hundred households) and not commercial service.

TalkTalk started in 2006, Sky was a couple of years later.

There are some vocal campaigns to make the pricing more like you said, i.e. you want fast speeds you pay more