Plus.net now equals BT Broadband lite?

Now that PN have been taken over by BT, does anyone know if there are any plans of making PN the budget version of BT Openworld in pretty much the same way that Volkswagen bought out both Seat and Skoda and made them sell cars to more price conscious consumers?

As James has said on more than one occassion, "Watch this space". As in the past, people are watching but nothing is happening

Both Seat and Skoda are good quality products.. cough..

Agreed and you get excellent quality for a lower price

Funnily enough I drive an 03 Seat Ibiza S and I have pretty much a VW Polo SE but paid about

Getting off track now but my wife had one of those and it was a nice car. I have one of the new shape Golfs as it was the only car I had enough leg room in !!!!

What do you mean by "making it the budget version of BT Openworld"?

By doing what, exactly? How would they make them sell to more price-conscious customers? By price-dropping, do you mean?

My understanding was that the PN brand was going to be retained, even within BT. I assume it would attract much the same customer profile it has always attracted.

I don't consider PN particularly down-market - although the entry-level product is keenly priced. I also don't consider myself a particularly budget-conscious customer. I don't have a more expensive product because I don't need one - simple as that. It's not that I'm watching pennies, particularly, but why pay for what I'm not going to use?

T.

Well, given that PN products seem to undercut BT's own it would be silly if BT were to drop their prices in order to try to go after a customer when in fact they can keep their products the same price but use PN as a way of getting a foothold in another area which they don't normally attract. Why would they want to lower prices and end up possibly cheapening their brand?

This is the same in the scenario that I described with VW.

A quick glance at the headline pricing then the BT broadband page tells me that their products are a bit more expensive than PN ones.

http://www.bt.com/broadband/bb_info.jsp?vendorid=SE9

Of course this isn't like for like but for some people the extras like wi-fi minutes would probably not be much use to them.

Edited by caesar_salad (Wed 21-Feb-07 17:05:41)

No, I thought you meant by lowering PN prices, not the existing BT ones.

I didn't really get what you meant about "making" PN the budget version of BT Openworld, because presumably, if they did nothing, it would already occupy that niche?

I must admit, I didn't do a price check, but I thought perhaps you were talking about dropping PN prices, to increase the differential, so that PN would have stronger appeal to the "bottom" end of the market.

It's always been my impression that BT prices were dearer. Although interestingly, my Dad reckons that if you challenge them, they're willing to individually renegotiate - although he himself hasn't put it to the test. I reckoned they might do the PN trick of offering a free month if you threaten to walk, but he reckons they'll do a permanently lower rate!

T.

I'm not sure if they would do what Sky would do by offering you half price line rental for the whole year, especially if you are currently paying the top whack package with all the bits and bobs.

I reckon that BT will probably tweak around the edges in order to differentiate their products from the BT branded ones, perhaps making the products have more off-peak hours and less peak ones as that is where the cost savings can be made.

In pretty much the same way that mobile companies are able to offer loads of off-peak minutes for very little money.

I'm sure that some people would be quite happy to have their machines running overnight given that that is the time that most of the US of A are up.

Like someone said before, we probably have to watch this space! I'm just glad that my prediction of last year (or was it 2 years ago?) re: PN being taken over came true, now if only I could predict tonight's Lotto numbers..