Posted: 28th Oct, 2010 By: MarkJ
BT has criticised the "
high price" of Virgin Media UK's new 100Mbps cable broadband service, which launched yesterday (
here) and will be available to 50%+ of the country by mid 2012. BT claims that the service, which costs from £35 per month when taken as part of a bundle, is
more than twice the price of their own fibre optic based broadband product and won't help families at a time when "
budgets are tight".
A BT Spokesman told ISPreview.co.uk:
"All superfast broadband is good for the UK and so it is encouraging to see Virgin say they will upgrade their network by 2012. BT is already rolling out fibre broadband to approximately 17 million homes and businesses and it is good for UK plc that there will be another high speed network, albeit one that is isn’t open to other companies in the way BT’s is.
Take up is as important as availability however and so we would question why Virgin are charging such a premium. Their new service is more than twice the price of BT's fibre product and so we are surprised by the high price when most family budgets are tight."
Admittedly BT does charge significantly less and offers a comparable "
unlimited" (Fair Usage Policy) package from £24.99 and similar bundles from £19.99 per month. However the operators FTTC service only delivers maximum download speeds of up to 40Mbps and it won't have a 100-110Mbps FTTP offering until 2011.
In addition Virgin Media can already
reach half of the country with its existing 50Mbps package that costs from £15 per month, which would perhaps be a fairer comparison for BT's FTTC. When BT has finally rolled out its 110Mb service (summer 2012), the same time as Virgin completes its 100Mbps rollout, it will only have covered 2.5m UK premises while Virgin will be within reach of half the country again.
Eventually BT should be able to reach 66% of UK homes with both its 40Mb FTTC and 100/110Mb FTTP products (2015), although until then the operator is likely to be stuck playing catch-up.