UK ISP Eclipse Internet Quietly Withdraws Home Broadband Products

Without even so much as a whisper the KCOM owned ISP Eclipse Internet has quietly updated their website to remove residential home broadband and phone products in order to re-focus more on the delivery of business services.

The writing has arguably been on the wall for a while, with Eclipse’s packages struggling to stay competitive with other offers from the big boys (BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and EE) or even some of their smaller competitors, such as the venerable Zen Internet.

In September 2014 a further nail was added to Eclipse’s home product coffin after Which?’s latest list of recommended broadband ISPs, which rated Eclipse Internet alongside a passable customer satisfaction score of 67% (here), noted that the ISP “no longer sells domestic broadband packages” (at the time Eclipse’s website was continuing to sell their home products).

A quick look at Eclipse’s twitter stream shows a variety of tweets where the operator responds to related concerns by giving the following statement: “We’re still committed to giving home customers a great service, but are finding most of our new customers are now businesses.” Indeed a new Home Users page on their website confirms that existing customers will continue to be supported.

Curiously many of Eclipse’s home customers don’t appear to have been aware of this adjustment in focus, which might be because the ISP isn’t so much rejecting new domestic customers as simply making their focus on the business market much more central. Never the less the removal of related products from their website is perhaps something that could have been better communicated.

In the meantime it’s important to note that you can still order ADSL2+ and FTTC services, albeit with pricing that would look more familiar to business than home customers. It’s perhaps further proof that offering a residential service in today’s aggressive competitive market is not an easy task.