It’s quite a neat trick for a company that doesn’t even have a mobile network to come out with a wireless broadband service, but British Telecom has gone one better, it has a combined wireless broadband and home broadband package ‘ and it will charge just £15.65 ($24) a month for it.
BT reckons the combination is the cheapest combo (double play?) in the UK and we have yet to hear similar deals in other countries. BT and calculates that even paying $75 for the mobile dongle, the entire service will cost only $460 for the first 18 months for both wired and wireless broadband. The deal only costs $12 for the first 3 months and then it will jump to $24 a month.
For that money your home gets a broadband line, which might be anything up to its fastest DSL 8Mbps, as well as 1GB of data on mobile broadband. It says that the same deal with Orange would cost just under $800 a year or on Virgin, better known for its full quadruple play, would be around $650.
The mobile broadband will give internet connectivity up to 7.2Mb using HSDPA on your laptop or net book when you are away from home. The USB dongle works on British Telecom’s virtual private network, which sits on the Vodafone network, which BT says covers 80% of the UK. Given that Vodafone wholesales BT broadband lines, we would expect it to be able to come up with a virtually identical deal of its own shortly.
John Petter, managing director of BT’s Consumer division, said: ‘This is the most complete home and mobile broadband deal, for only 56p a day is a no-brainer. Now you can use broadband wherever you are, without worrying about the cost.’
BT says that as a rough guide 1GB will allows someone to send 300 e-mails, surf the web for 400 minutes, download one film, or 48 photos or 144 songs. Customers who need more than 1GB a month, can top up.
This service will also include 250 minutes a month membership of the BT FON network of 400,000 BT FON hotspots around the world, and WiFi minutes at BT Openzone hotspots across the UK and Ireland. Customers will also benefit from BT’s rollout of hotspots at 650 Starbucks coffeehouses in the UK and Ireland.
BT has Connection Manager software (included) which chooses what’s the cheapest connection between mobile broadband and Wi-Fi depending upon where you are and what deal you have.
BT already offers a standalone 1GB prepay USB modem, but it charges a massive $195 for the modem but then it is free for 18 months, which BT says also undercuts the competition in a long term cost of ownership view. On the other hand most packages charge $75 for the modem or nothing.