It’s about time – BT have always been at the pricier end of broadband pricing, but the communications giant has finally made a significant reduction to the price of its basic broadband service.
Now set at a far more enticing and competitive UK£19.99 per month, the service is limited to one home PC (but if you bridge it, how would they know?) and supplies a full 512kbs. However, there’s one very unattractive condition to this new package – downloads are limited to one measly gigabyte per month. Once you’ve downloaded your equivalent of 200 iTunes tracks or a couple of games, you will be sent a reminder with the option to buy more bandwidth. We applaud the new price point form BT, but think the data limitation is a step backwards. Can’t have it both ways, we suppose.
Remember, some “broadband” packages you see offered for UK£20 and less often just give you 256kbs and less, so always read the terms and conditions.
BT’s new service
The FT’s comment
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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