Posted: 06th Jun, 2007 By: MarkJ
Comparison site uSwitch has attacked UK ISP Tiscali for adjusting its broadband prices so that customers living outside of its unbundled (
LLU) network are forced to pay more.
Rival provider AOL UK recently took an identical stance, while Sky and TalkTalk (Carphone Warehouse) have been doing it for awhile. Ironically Tiscali had previously been praised for not following the trend:
The new Tiscali pricing, effective from 4th June, is great news for the fortunate customers living within Tiscalis
LLU broadband network. They are being offered an 8Mb broadband service, free UK calls and line rental, normally £11, for a total of £19.99 a month. However, the new pricing is less favourable for customers living outside their unbundled network, who will pay £19.99 plus a discounted line rental fee of £8.25 a month for the same services.
Steve Weller, Head of Communication Services at uSwitch.com, comments:
Its very disheartening to see Tiscali jumping onto the anti-consumer bandwagon of imposing additional charges on customers that fall outside their LLU network. AOL announced similar charges last week and we have a growing concern about this becoming standard practice in the broadband industry. Its simply not acceptable that one customer has to pay more for an identical or sometimes inferior service just because their postcode happens to fall outside their providers LLU hit list."
Unfortunately this may just be a fact of unbundling that we have to accept as larger ISP's move to separate themselves from BT's network and undercut rivals.
Meanwhile there's still a lot of choice in the market and hopefully consumers will realise that they don't have to put up with an ISP's behaviour and can switch to alternatives.
We'd much prefer to see ISP's balancing the longer term savings of an unbundled network against generally lower prices or better performance, but it doesn't look like that's the game plan. More @
Easier Finance.