;)
Keep a check on this page for all the latest on BT's rollout of ADSL and
Nildram's
service plans.
18th November 1999
The BT trial of ADSL is apparently now underway. This trial was
unfortunately severely restricted to only 5,000 consumers nationwide.
Wholesale pricing has also been published, and for the basic service, which
provides a 512kbps download speed and 256kbps upload speed, with a
contention ratio of 20:1 (i.e. 20 other users will be competing with you
for that bandwidth), the pricing works out as follows:
Installation: £260 + VAT
Annual Rental: £1065 + VAT
In addition to these charges, any ISP providing the service will have to
pay for a connection to BT to deliver the data inwards. At its cheapest,
this will work out at an additional £50 per annum, and at its most
expensive, £745 per annum (this all depends on volume). On top of that, we
then have to deliver your data across the Internet and make a charge for
that.
You can probably see from these figures that unless BT does some drastic
price cutting, we are still a long way off from the £40/month figures that
the press like to dream about. More like £150 - £200 a month, we
suspect.
Nildram fully intends to offer this service just as soon as we are able.
However, we don't expect the BT rollout to start until March 2000, and then
it will be a fairly gradual process. After all, BT don't want to stop the
tills ringing from the sound of all those dial-up call minutes that are
being generated every day until they are really forced to do so, one way or
the other.
20th August 1999
Latest news from BT is that the trial launch will begin in October 1999,
and service will be available from the following exchanges in London:
Acton,
Addiscombe,
Albert Dock,
Barnet,
Bermondsey,
Bishopsgate,
Bloomsbury,
Canonbury,
Catford,
Chiswick,
Colindale,
Covent Garden,
Cricklewood,
Crouch End,
Croydon,
Deptford,
Dulwich,
Ealing,
Faraday,
Finchley,
Fulham,
Golders Green,
Hammersmith,
Hampstead,
Hendon,
Howland Street,
Kentish Town,
Lee Green,
Lords,
Lower Holloway,
Maida Vale,
Mitcham,
Muswell Hill,
New Southgate,
Nine
Elms,
North Finchley,
North Paddington,
Palmers Green,
Poplar,
Primrose Hill,
Purley,
Romford,
Rushey Green,
Shepherds Bush,
South Kensington,
Southbank,
Staines,
Stratford,
Streatham,
Sutton Cheam,
Thornton Heath,
Upper Holloway,
Upton Park,
Uxbridge,
Wallington,
Watford,
Westminster,
Weybridge,
Whitehall,
Wood Street
>From March 2000, service will be available from a total of 400 exchanges -
including London, Cardiff, Belfast, Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester,
Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Early indications show that prices could be as much as £200 per month for
an all-inclusive service - nothing like as cheap as many people have been
led to believe. However, even at this price, the service will still offer
outstanding value for money compared to the available alternatives.
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