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I heard for the first time today of the charges that an ISP, other than BT, will be placing on customers that want to buy an official FTTC service (as opposed to any trial services).
Eclipse Internet will want customers to pay £49.95 per month! That is twice the cost of BT Infinity and for a service that sounds like it will have more restrictions also.
Eclipse Internet will offer thier ‘unlimited‘ package as a 2 tier solution, giving users a usage limit between certain hours and free-for-all at ungodly times of the morning (much like many ISP’s do with ADSL contracts today). I am not saying that is a bad thing, I in fact expect the majority of UK providers to do the same. What I am struggling with is the price! What were the product development team thinking?
For those of you with more money than sense, you can have your wallets royally abused from April 2010 according to their customer support.
My advice however (and I can’t believe I am saying this), is get your MAC code and switch to BT Infinity.
26 March, 2010 at 09:41
Just to advise that the Eclipse product is not the same as the BT Infinity product which is aimed at consumers rather than businesses.
The Eclipse product will have guaranteed throughput of 12Mb which is a massive step forward in braodband speeds as your service will not be between 0-40Mb but 12-40Mb with service level assurance.
Our usage levels are also transparrent and customers can see what they use via our portal and buy additional usage if needed. Most ISP’s that have ‘unlimited’ services have a FUP and heavily traffic shape. BT have not stated what their FUP limit acually is.
Many thanks
Paul
26 March, 2010 at 10:59
Hi Paul Richens,
Thanks for your internal Eclipse views to this thread on the experiences gained when calling the numerous ISPs operating in the UK.
Actually, the FTTC services that are being released by other companies (like BT Infinity, Plusnet, Sky ….) have a MINIMUM guarantee of 15Mb/s connection speed. If the line checker thinks that a users line is not capable of supporting this speed, it will decline the service as being available. BT Wholesale plan to have a sub 15Mb/s service offering later in the year. However, if you check my speed vs. distance chart I am dubious of what benefit people that far from the PCP will see over ADSL technology (other than better upload speeds possibly ???).
I admit that the Eclipse FTTC offering does appear under the ‘business’ section of the website but that was not relayed by the customer support (and why is there not a residential service anyway??).
With regards to the FUP of BT Total Broadband, I am aware of users that already surpass 100GB of streamed video content (not BT Vision content) per month without hearing a peep from BT, so I think that there call of ‘unlimited’ is fair in this case. My service provider, (Plusnet) are also ultra transparent with their applied account limits and between which times they account traffic stats. Additionally they clearly advertise their networks QoS policies and the potential impact on different network services that I might want to use at different times of the day.