Posted: 27th May, 2004 By: MarkJ
BT is to start itemising broadband bills in order to better utilise their new 'capacity based charging' system. The change will be introduced during the summer, although some may see it as a way to legitimise dialup style metering:
As the price war for 512Kbps broadband services escalates, itemised billing will help ISPs cut their losses by enabling them to put bandwidth caps on their sub-£20 products and bill for extra capacity.
The bandwidth data will be made available by BT Wholesale from 28 May and will allow ISPs to provide more transparent pricing models for 'turbo' bandwidth services. To date, they've had no way of proving how much bandwidth a customer had used in a month, making it hard to charge premiums for excessive usage.
'At the moment, customer information is provided to ISPs from our back-end server, which details the start and end times of individual user sessions,' said a spokesman at BT Wholesale. 'But the higher functionality launching this month will offer a breakdown of bytes used in both the upstream and downstream.'
We've always said that so long as ISP's continue to offer unmetered broadband services alongside any new products then it's all merely extra choice.
However, it's growing harder to shake the fear that the UK's broadband "service" market is now moving ever backwards instead of forwards. More @ NewMediaZero.