Written by Ken Young, whose own blog is called The UK Mobile Report.
The price of standalone broadband in the UK has dropped 36 per cent since 2004, while average speeds have increased 16 times in the same period, according to a survey of services by price comparison specialists uSwitch. The UK now has 15 million households spending an average of $33 per month — or $6 billion per year, in total — for an 8 Mbps connection.
This price drop reflects a highly competitive retail market, and it’s likely to spur providers to offer more features as a way to increase loyalty and gain extra revenue.
There is much speculation about how this will occur. One particularly good summary is given by the UK blog Telco 2.0 (a project of UK consultancy firm STL Partners), which talks of a move toward using location and presence to enable everyday business processes (e.g. parcel delivery, health care services), ad insertion, or e-commerce services like credit checks.
That might be the way forward for the telcos, but most subscribers remain obsessed with speed. Virgin Media is leading the market with plans for a 50Mb service by year-end. But as uSwitch notes, Virgin is also the only major provider offering packages at more than one speed.
From the consumer perspective, more also needs to be done to make switching between suppliers in the UK easier. Notably, unless you are using web-based email, the email address you have cannot be transferred to your new supplier. Meanwhile many users are locked into bundled deals that offer phone, broadband and TV.
Experts also say it is hard to compare UK services on an apples-to-apples basis, as actual broadband speeds offered vary depending on a number of technical factors. Users also have to look carefully in the small print of their contracts to find out what ‘fair use’ policies apply, as most providers have introduced caps to restrict heavy users.
What is unclear is whether consumers will be attracted by broadband with such value-added services, or if they’ll opt to stick with vanilla services, which are likely to be cheaper and easier to compare. Much depends on how innovative the telcos can be.
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10:11 AM PT
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12:49 PM PT
[...] There is much speculation about how this will occur. One particularly good summary is given by the UK blog Telco 2.0 (a project of UK consultancy firm STL Partners), which talks of a move toward using location and presence to enable everyday business processes (e.g. parcel delivery, health care services), ad insertion, or e-commerce services like credit checks. (from GigaOm) [...]
3 comments so far
12:17 PM PT
Broadband over here may be cheap, but it is not fast.
Most people may be on Up to 8meg plans, but outside of cities (or even inside many of them) you rarely get past 6meg.
Also, the capping of downloading for the cheap services makes most online media (BBS iPlayer, 4OD, etc) inaccessible as downloading more than a couple of shows a month would put many people over their downloading limit.
I’m not saying it is in a particularly bad state (there are some ISPs which offer very good services at reasonable prices (Zen, Be and Demon come to mind), but most either oversell so peak times are miserably slow (Tiscali) or have low caps. Most people sadly don’t understand the difference and really think that all the services are roughly the same, so cheaper is better.
12:52 PM PT
I agree with the UK blog Telco 2.0 that services like location, presence, can enable many everyday business processes within the broadband users. But, such applications and many others like unified messaging, local files access and sharing will remain only in the corporate domain as long as machines hosted in broadband are not able to maintain a communication channel between each other or automatically reconnect to each other at any given time despite the continuous change of their dynamic IP addresses.
Likely Mundial Communications has been working toward to this goal. They have just launched on beta their Yambi platform.
Yambi is a messaging and collaboration platform for the consumer. It promises to bring corporate messaging and collaboration services as well as the web social networking experience to your desktop at home or office. It allows users to organize their messaging and collaboration world into a totally secure Personal and Private Virtual Network (PPVN) from their own local hard drive.
Its multi-threaded, network independent messaging and collaboration server called “Zion.db provides an automatic connection, secure communication channel, direct data exchange and particularly over the air data manipulation between itself, its clients and its correlated servers hosted in “non-interconnected” computers across disparate networks (broadband, …).
Unlike Microsoft, IBM, Cisco… solutions that require expensive servers and dedicated networks, Zion-db server can operate in any Internet connection(slow,fast; dynamic or static). It can host all your Email accounts (POP, IMAP; private and corporate)in one interface, and deliver, - as never before affordable -, a user-friendly Mobile Email (push-pull), secure, private and archived Instant Messaging (Mobile, Web, Desktop); Contacts management with Presence (Server hosted); Desktop Social Networking; Voice over IP etc..
Screenshots of their desktop client can be viewed at (link)
2:08 PM PT
I think you have your answer already….BT retook the #1 position in the UK in 2006, despite other BT costing more than most other providers and ‘only’ offering 8Mbps, and despite other companies launching free offerings and faster offerings. BT’s ‘Complete’ message is obviously resonating well, as well as BT’s commitment to customer service.
I think bundling is going to be key in the next 12 months, you just have to look at how fast Sky broadband has grown in the last 12 months.
I’m not convinced about the need or demand for location and mobile services in the UK by users.
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