Vodafone UK Opens Pre-Registration for Home Broadband and Phone Service

Telecoms giant Vodafone UK has quietly added a pre-registration page for their forthcoming fixed line Home Broadband and Phone service, which reveals that the new product will be called VodafoneConnect.

According to Thinkbroadband, which spotted the development, Vodafone’s mobile customers have also started to receive SMS text messages that point to the new page and indeed the operator’s original plan was to launch the service sometime during the Spring 2015 window. A TV (IPTV) solution is also expected to follow later this year.

Sadly the pre-registration page doesn’t give away any details, although we know that Vodafone will connect their existing fibre optic broadband network to around 1,000 of BT’s parent telephone exchanges in order to reach roughly 80% of the country by the summer. “We will be putting in our routers at the VDSL [FTTC] parent exchanges,” said a Vodafone spokesperson to ISPreview.co.uk earlier this year.

The operator is widely anticipated to offer a mix of ADSL2+ (up to 20Mbps) and FTTC (up to 80Mbps) based broadband packages, although they’ll need to come up with something special in order to entice customers away from their competitors. But that’s going to be incredibly difficult given that practically all of the market’s potential niches are already covered.

Vodafone’s next challenge will be to keep their products well promoted and to communicate any changes with the wider media, which was somewhat of a weak point with their first attempt to launch a fixed line broadband service (Vodafone At Home) some years back. Vodafone Connect will surely face an uphill battle in order to break into what is now a fairly saturated market.