ISPreview investigates the future of ISDN in the UK

-Expensive:

For the speed your getting combined with limited unmetered support it's still expensive. You'll pay at least £25 per month for ISDN itself, but if you want unmetered then you might have to settle for 64Kbps. Considering cable operators can go as low as £20 per month, why won't BT be competitive and do the same or similar? At least then it'd be a viable alternative to ADSL.

Cost vs Cost

ISPreview asked its readers, some ISPs and even BT themselves, what they thought the future held, but before we get to that lets take a look at the costs (based on BT):

Cable Modems:

At least £33 per month for the unmetered connection (unsure about line rental, included or not?), adaptor costs £250+/-. Installation costs are uncertain, varies (£100 to £200?).

ADSL:

At least £40 per month for unmetered connection + £20 to £26 line rental = around £70+/-. Adaptor sometimes comes free, usually retails for at least £125 (less if Ethernet option). Installation costs free for some and £100 to £200 for others.

ISDN:

At least £25 per month including line rental, £27 for lowest sustained rental from BT (£20 through third part cable co's/Telewest excluded). Adaptors cost from £30 upwards and installation is around £49.99.

So in terms of costs, ISDN comes in as the cheapest with Cable Modems following and ADSL in way at the back and last. Of course ISDN isn't unmetered and once you include the unmetered costs it looks more like C-Modems first, ISDN second and ADSL last, again.

The point people are trying to make is that ISDN has been around for so long and now with the new unmetered broadband options it seems expensive by comparison. Although it's not quite that expensive, at least a drop on the rental to around £20 per month would be viable and competitive.

However now you're starting to see the problem from BT's angle, the sustained £27 per month isn't actually that far off from analogue line costs. The moment you see that and try to compare the pricing of different BT services is the moment you see how anti-competitive and over priced a provider they really are.

Consumer Views

As said earlier, we put the question of ISDNs future to our readers and decided to see what they had to say.

NOTE: We are not responsible for any spelling or grammar errors made in these quotes, changing them would defraud the originality:

[Print Page | Next Page (4)]>>