Yesterday, Virgin Media launched 100Mb cable broadband for the UK which is expected to be available to over 50% of the country by mid 2012, and it seems one of their rivals, the biggest UK ISP BT are quick to criticise the new service when it comes to their prices saying they are "surprised by the high price". Alright BT, settle down. It's not like you want to be digging your own grave here or anything when people compare a variety of prices (foreshadowing).
The BT spokesman who began talking of Virgin Media's new service praised the company, saying it was "encouraging to see Virgin say they will upgrade their network by 2012" and "good for UK plc that there will be another high speed network". However, this praise is short lived as the spokespersons true objective was clearly to still insist that BT was superior.
At the moment BT is giving fibre optic broadband to 17 million homes and services with a cost average of around £20 a month. Virgin Media's new service which goes live from Christmas and will be available to 12.7 million homes by mid 2012 comes in at £45 a month on its own or £35 if packaged with a phone line. BT has obviously hung up on this since a rival costing over double the price does have its obvious advantages when marketing against it.
BT's services at the moment however only run at a 40Mb speed, and isn't expected to have a 100Mb+ service until next year, and it is believed in the time it takes Virgin Media to hit their 12.7 million homes, BT will only have hit 2.5 million. As well as this, Virgin is already offering a 50Mb broadband service at £15 which comes in cheaper than BT. So maybe criticism here is not well advised.
Via: Electric Pig, ISPreview
4 thoughts on “BT Attacks Price of Virgin Media’s 100Mb Broadband”
Why oh Why oh Why does BT continue to moan about Virgin Media and it’s broadband services. If they had got out of their caves 20+ years ago and upgraded there own network, maybe people would have had a better choice of high speed ISP providers.
I have been with Virgin Media for almost 10 years and in that time my local BT digital exchange has never been able to offer me more that 2mb on a good day. Why ?????
Oh it will cost us tooooo much to upgrade the cable routes….
Well maybe you should have thought more about that when you spent a small fortune on building a state of the ark digital exchange out of range of almost 3000+ houses in my area who can now use Fibre optic broadband thanks to VirginMedia
i have also been with vm for many years and have never had any probs.i am now on 50 mb and it is superb.looking forward to 100 mb december or january.as kevin said bt have been happy to take our money for decades bt havnt been keen to modernise
@Kevin, it was the governments fault that BT didn’t put fibre optic into everyones homes over 20 years ago. BT wanted to do it but the only waybthey could justify the expense was if the could use the same network to put out Tv. The cable companies were struggling to get a foot hold in the Market so the government ruled it would be anti competitive to allow BT to do it.