Continuing from yesterday's planned changes from BT they have announced the launch of new products. While this is good news for some they fall short in speed to other countries that are leading with speeds of up 1.5Mps to 3Mps. The new IPStream products are Home 250 and home 2000.

Pricing wise, it all looks very average. Home 250, is pencilled in at £12.25+VAT, and Home 2000 at £38+VAT. Home 250 is just 75p cheaper than Home 500, which means it will not appeal on price terms. Home 2000 is proportionally more expensive than Home 1000, though this may be due to realisation that it will appeal to users who use more than the average download per day. This wholesale pricing would suggest high street prices of £17.50 (inc VAT) for Home 250, and around £55 (inc VAT) a month minimum for Home 2000.

The capacity/usage news masked to some extent a new option that will give ISP's or end user's the ability to control their downstream speed. This would combine with the new capacity and usage models and maybe give users some control over their monthly costs if metered billing becomes the norm. The proposed speed settings are 64, 150, 250, 500, 750, 1000, 1500 and 2000kbps (kilo bits per second). There is a real chance that this scale of speeds is actually BT's attempt at a downstream rate adaptive service, something else that has been rumoured in the last few months. In which case it is not true rate adaption, some people had hoped rate adaption may have meant BT allowed lines to adapt between 250kbps and 8Mbps, and run at what ever the modem and DSLAM could manage without errors.

While this is a step forward in speed it falls short in what is available in other countries, BT look to only be working on marketing when they could have taken the lead. They only seem able to compete with companies that have had 2000kps for a while now. Britain still is unable to jump onto the speed revolution. More information @ ADSLGuide