BT Infinity - is there any real competition?

Hi,

BT Infinity has arrived for our home, which is great, but I just thought I'd look at other fibre broadband providers before jumping ship from Eclipse, my current ISP.

Zen, always a favorite, quotes £30/mth for 50GB plus £75 activation fee. Both plus Vat

Eclipse, quotes £39.95/mth for 100GB. Plus, I would have to buy a fibre compatible router.

BT, quotes £18/mth for 40GB which includes 'Unlimited calls to UK landlines at weekends' and a free hub. Although, there is a £25 activation fee.

Am I missing something here? For the average home user who probably doesn't need 100GB, why would anyone choose either Zen or Eclipse? Do ISP's other than BT have any chance in competing for home users with the current pricing differences?

Thanks!

BT is pricing just as it did back in 2000/2001 ie at cost price in an attempt to gain market share

TalkTalk has said it will start to offer FTTC, and Plusnet are in the trial stages.

It is very hard for the others to compete with the extremely low price of BT Infinity. One has to wonder whether it is profitable.

I looked at most and narrowed it down to IDNet v BT. But I didn't want to include a calls package as I already get free E & W off BT as a long-standing phone Option 2 customer. So it was IDNet Starter v BT Infinity.

I then looked at the respective costs of Infinity Option 1 and 2, and the £50 setup on Option 1 brings it to nearly the same as Option 2 over 12 months. It is of course an 18-month contract.

I chose IDNet because there already signs of congestion on Infinity and that can only get worse. I trust IDNet to upgrade as necessary - that is after all one of their main selling planks. Only a 12-month contract as well. I paid for the year up front to get one month free.

Even if I find my usage increase from my usual 7GB or so per month I have a lot of headroom before I might need to upgrade, even though in effect I have a 15GB allowance. No overnight downloading here , so the 45GB available there is wasted.

On a suggestion from Matt of xilo/uno I got a Buffalo Airstation Nfiniti WHR-G300N for £23.56 delivered. It seems to be better than my previous all-in-one Speedtouches and Netgear 834 series ADSL routers.

In reply to a post by StepOne:

Hi,

BT Infinity has arrived for our home, which is great, but I just thought I'd look at other fibre broadband providers before jumping ship from Eclipse, my current ISP.

Zen, always a favorite, quotes £30/mth for 50GB plus £75 activation fee. Both plus Vat

Eclipse, quotes £39.95/mth for 100GB. Plus, I would have to buy a fibre compatible router.

BT, quotes £18/mth for 40GB which includes 'Unlimited calls to UK landlines at weekends' and a free hub. Although, there is a £25 activation fee.

Am I missing something here? For the average home user who probably doesn't need 100GB, why would anyone choose either Zen or Eclipse? Do ISP's other than BT have any chance in competing for home users with the current pricing differences?

Thanks!

Not really. But BT aren't really competing with other FTTC ISPs who are a lot smaller than they are. They're competing with Virgin and when you compare the prices between those two it becomes a lot clearer what it is happening and how BT have picked their spot.

Is Infinity profitable for BT? Who knows. If the older ADSL products are then there's no reason FTTC won't be the same longer term. For those on Option 2 it comes to a shade over 450 quid a year per customer (when you include line rental which BT makes a killing on). If you look through their Financial Reports for 2010 you can see they had a pretty good year with profits up and debt down by over 1 billion.

why would anyone choose either Zen or Eclipse?

fixed IP address, flexible SMTP service, English native support, Yahoo-free email, peak time speed, etc.

In reply to a post by StepOne:

Am I missing something here? For the average home user who probably doesn't need 100GB, why would anyone choose either Zen or Eclipse? Do ISP's other than BT have any chance in competing for home users with the current pricing differences?
[

Let's face it. Whatever the technology, everybody will have connection issues from time to time. For me it's not all about what happens when things go wrong.

I buy the bread from Morrissons and the Steak from Waitrose.

[wink]

In reply to a post by orly:

Not really. But BT aren't really competing with other FTTC ISPs who are a lot smaller than they are. They're competing with Virgin and when you compare the prices between those two it becomes a lot clearer what it is happening and how BT have picked their spot.

This does make me wonder whether BT will introduce different prices for FTTC in areas where they are not competing with Virgin.

I would like to see BT price FTTC at a level where they can afford to cover nearly all of the country. Virgin should contribute to the cost of doing this.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by orly:

Not really. But BT aren't really competing with other FTTC ISPs who are a lot smaller than they are. They're competing with Virgin and when you compare the prices between those two it becomes a lot clearer what it is happening and how BT have picked their spot.

This does make me wonder whether BT will introduce different prices for FTTC in areas where they are not competing with Virgin.

I would like to see BT price FTTC at a level where they can afford to cover nearly all of the country. Virgin should contribute to the cost of doing this.

Not that many Virgin areas here in N.Ireland and none within about 12 miles of my town but Infinity is the same price as anywhere else. You can click my exchange details in my signature for more information.

Edited by orly (Thu 03-Mar-11 22:01:12)

your wrong yes is quite a few areas that has VM in N.Ireland

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

your wrong yes is quite a few areas that has VM in N.Ireland

Bits of Belfast, Londonderry, Holywood and Lisburn from memory?

Not exactly vast coverage.

i think at this stage well for the next 6-9 months it will be just BT and VM going head to head with each other then maybe sky will have FTTC ready for then

BT Infinity charge a lot more for business premises. We're a small business and we went for Fast.co.uk, who don't discriminate between business and residential, and pay £27.56 including VAT per month for a 12 month contract (we can't be sure we will be staying at our current premises for 2 years, which is the cheapest option for BT). BT would want £60/month (although free installation compared to £52 for Fast.co.uk) inc.VAT. Yes, we have a 45GB download cap, but there is no bandwidth shaping and uploads are not metered. WE have 10Mbs upload on this deal too (in reality, an impressive 8Mbs).

Ian

Edited by deleted (Fri 04-Mar-11 13:56:34)

In reply to a post by StepOne:

Hi,

BT Infinity has arrived for our home, which is great, but I just thought I'd look at other fibre broadband providers before jumping ship from Eclipse, my current ISP.

Zen, always a favorite, quotes £30/mth for 50GB plus £75 activation fee. Both plus Vat

Eclipse, quotes £39.95/mth for 100GB. Plus, I would have to buy a fibre compatible router.

BT, quotes £18/mth for 40GB which includes 'Unlimited calls to UK landlines at weekends' and a free hub. Although, there is a £25 activation fee.

Am I missing something here? For the average home user who probably doesn't need 100GB, why would anyone choose either Zen or Eclipse? Do ISP's other than BT have any chance in competing for home users with the current pricing differences?

Thanks!

BT is by far the better value one assuming everything else is equal such as quality of service.

I think for whatever reason BT are underselling their own product as a loss leader, as a result quality will be impacted. They have no real need to sell it that cheap unless the CEO is under pressure to get signups at no matter what cost.

I mentioned in another thread its barely more expensive than VM's 10mbit product.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sat 05-Mar-11 11:29:04)

If TalkTalk start to offer FTTC will they have to install their own fibre alongside that of BT or will there be some sort of sharing?

Sorry -just found the TalkTalk FTTC thread. All is now marginally clearer.

Edited by deleted (Tue 22-Mar-11 18:59:16)

aquiss all the way

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by orly:

Not really. But BT aren't really competing with other FTTC ISPs who are a lot smaller than they are. They're competing with Virgin and when you compare the prices between those two it becomes a lot clearer what it is happening and how BT have picked their spot.

This does make me wonder whether BT will introduce different prices for FTTC in areas where they are not competing with Virgin.

I would like to see BT price FTTC at a level where they can afford to cover nearly all of the country. Virgin should contribute to the cost of doing this.

Why should Virgin pay to subsidies BT's roll out?

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

In reply to a post by StepOne:

Hi,

BT Infinity has arrived for our home, which is great, but I just thought I'd look at other fibre broadband providers before jumping ship from Eclipse, my current ISP.

Zen, always a favorite, quotes £30/mth for 50GB plus £75 activation fee. Both plus Vat

Eclipse, quotes £39.95/mth for 100GB. Plus, I would have to buy a fibre compatible router.

BT, quotes £18/mth for 40GB which includes 'Unlimited calls to UK landlines at weekends' and a free hub. Although, there is a £25 activation fee.

Am I missing something here? For the average home user who probably doesn't need 100GB, why would anyone choose either Zen or Eclipse? Do ISP's other than BT have any chance in competing for home users with the current pricing differences?

Thanks!

BT is by far the better value one assuming everything else is equal such as quality of service.

I think for whatever reason BT are underselling their own product as a loss leader, as a result quality will be impacted. They have no real need to sell it that cheap unless the CEO is under pressure to get signups at no matter what cost.

I mentioned in another thread its barely more expensive than VM's 10mbit product.

If they are selling it at a loss they would be breaking competition law and could be heavilly fined for it

In reply to a post by deeor:

If TalkTalk start to offer FTTC will they have to install their own fibre alongside that of BT or will there be some sort of sharing?

Sorry -just found the TalkTalk FTTC thread. All is now marginally clearer.

I don't know where the TT FTTC thread is, but it will use the BT Openreach FTTC product with handover to TT at the exchnage.

There are two possible systems at that stage, GEA and VULA.

I believe the BT Wholesale product which all the current FTTC ISPs use (VM Cable excepted of course) is GEA. VULA more closely approaches the ADSLx type of LLU where the ISP has more control over the line behaviour than Openreach provide on GEA. Perhaps the Openreach DLM isn't implemented on VULA for instance - to be honest I'm not high on VULA details.

Thanks for that

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

In reply to a post by StepOne:

Hi,

BT Infinity has arrived for our home, which is great, but I just thought I'd look at other fibre broadband providers before jumping ship from Eclipse, my current ISP.

Zen, always a favorite, quotes £30/mth for 50GB plus £75 activation fee. Both plus Vat

Eclipse, quotes £39.95/mth for 100GB. Plus, I would have to buy a fibre compatible router.

BT, quotes £18/mth for 40GB which includes 'Unlimited calls to UK landlines at weekends' and a free hub. Although, there is a £25 activation fee.

Am I missing something here? For the average home user who probably doesn't need 100GB, why would anyone choose either Zen or Eclipse? Do ISP's other than BT have any chance in competing for home users with the current pricing differences?

Thanks!

BT is by far the better value one assuming everything else is equal such as quality of service.

I think for whatever reason BT are underselling their own product as a loss leader, as a result quality will be impacted. They have no real need to sell it that cheap unless the CEO is under pressure to get signups at no matter what cost.

I mentioned in another thread its barely more expensive than VM's 10mbit product.

If they are selling it at a loss they would be breaking competition law and could be heavilly fined for it

in that case so would also sky and O2, as they have been doing the same for years. Or do you think free broadband is profiteable?

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

If they are selling it at a loss they would be breaking competition law and could be heavilly fined for it

Which law?

I think you mean OfCom rules, and wrt FTTC (although I haven't checked the detail) those have been relaxed for BT. Whether just Openreach, or the whole group, is what I don't know.

"but it will use the BT Openreach FTTC product "

Yep, fitted one last week. Trialist, worked for TT.

GEA or VULA, or don't you get involved at that level?

In reply to a post by deeor:

If TalkTalk start to offer FTTC will they have to install their own fibre alongside that of BT or will there be some sort of sharing?

Sorry -just found the TalkTalk FTTC thread. All is now marginally clearer.

Nope, all TalkTalk data will be handed over from the BT Equipment onto TalkTalk's equipment via Ethernet at the exchange.
As a result, it will not be automatic - I believe TalkTalk will have to upgrade their equipment at each individual exchange to handle the new handover arrangements.

Despite all of this, the only sharing which will be occurring is on the fibres which connect the FTTC cabinets to the exchange, but this isn't much of a worry though as cabinets can have multiples of 1Gbps links

I hope this helps.

GEA, as far as I could tell.

Ta.