Sky has extended its half price offer until October 31st. You will get Sky half price for the first 3 months on any package if you sign up between now and October 31st. Sky’s cheapest package is normally £15 per month and is now £7.50 for the first 3 months.
You will also receive a £10 credit if you sign up online.
The newly merged ntl Telewest and Virgin Mobile has announced a bundled broadband, digital TV, home phone and mobile phone service. Industry insiders call this “quad-play”. Until now, the most any single provider has managed to offer is “triple play”, which is a bundle of 3 services, normally broadband, digital TV and home phone.
The new quad-play service offers great value for money. For £40 per month you will receive all four products. You will enjoy the following:
Broadband
Digital TV
Home Phone
Mobile
If you do not want all four services, you can order the Virgin Mobile service with any other ntl or Telewest service for an extra £10 per month (normally £20 per month).
To sign up to the £40 per month broadband, mobile, digital TV and home phone service, visit either the ntl or the Telewest website by clicking on one of the following links. This will take you to a 3 for £30 page (broabband, digital TV and home phone). You will be able to add the Virgin mobile service to the bundle during the ordering process, bringing the total price up to £40 per month.
A new version of the very popular iPod nano has been released. The new iPod nano is thinner, has a brighter screen and up to 24 hours battery life. It is available in five colours: silver, blue, pink, green and black.
There are three models available. The 2Gb model holds approximately 500 songs and is available for £99 at the Apple Store. The 4Gb model holds approximately 1000 songs and is available for £129. The 8Gb model holds approximately 1000 songs and is available for £169.
Orange has announched that it will offer a new service that combines a mobile phone with a VoIP service. A single mobile handset will act as a landline and a mobile. The handset will operate in the customers house using WiFi (Wireless Internet) to access a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol - making phone calls over a broadband connection) connection. Outside the customers house, the handset will work as a normal mobile phone.
The service is very similar to a BT service called BT Fusion. The Orange service will be available in November.
The Carphone Warehouse is set to expand into the USA, according to some industry insiders. A deal with American firm Best Buy will allow Carphone Warehouse to sell mobile handsets through its retail stores. It will also allow Carphone Warhouse to use Best Buy’s broadband technical support, called the Geek Squad. This will help alleviate TalkTalk’s (part of Carphone Warehouse) problems with complaints about a lack of support for its broadband service.
The broadband market has undergone nothing sort of a revolution in the past 3 years. From a service dedicated to only the most committed of internet users, to a mass market service that everyone home in the UK should really have. The rate of increase has been nothing short of phenomenal.
But this broadband growth has caused a deep flaw in the market. Broadband providers knew that it was going to be very difficult to attract customers once they have signed up with a rival provider. So providers have been at all out war with each other to attract broadband adaptors while they are up for grabs. The war is being fought on two fronts. A price front and a technological front.
The war being fought on the price front simply involved providers having to constantly under cut each other. From £25 per month, to £20 to £15. Then it was £9.99, which was an amazing price front. Now, the price that we all expect is free. Yes, providers are giving broadband away for free. Of course, this means that you have to sign up to a bundle with at least one other, non-free, product. But we all use those products anyway, so there is not any extra cost.
The technological front involved providers having to offer ever-increasing speeds to stay ahead of their competitors. When broadband first came out, it was at a speed of 512kb, which was ten times faster than we were used to on dialup. Now you can reach speeds of 24Mb, some 480 times faster than a dial up connection. This need for speed does not come for free. Providers have had to invest in their own network with the very latest in technological advances.
So to succeed in the broadband market, providers have had to spend millions in technology and drop the price down to zero. Broadband is now nothing more than a loss leader. A product that is used to attract customers to another product that that company offers. But those other products, mainly home phone and digital TV, are also highly competitive. The intense pressure on providers to survive has lead to consolidations with bigger providers swallowing up smaller ones.
But where is the future heading? Well, the simple answer is even more consolidation. But not only will the bigger providers swallow up the smaller ones. The bigger providers are the ones that face the most pressure, with high overheads and angry shareholders. Bigger providers will start to absorb each other. This trend has already begun with two of the broadband powerhouses, AOL and Tiscali, putting their UK’s operations up for sale. Only the strongest of the strong will survive. This will lead to less competition and therefore less choice in the long run. But then how much choice do we actually need. The market is likely to become more like the mobile market, which only has 6 main networks. Competition is still rife amongst those 6, so as consumers, we will still be able to demand the world from broadband providers.
The UK arms of AOL and Tiscali are up for sale.
AOL is the UK’s third biggest broadband provider, with 2.2 million customers. The Carphone Warehouse and BSkyB are both rumoured to be trying to gain control of AOL UK.
Tiscali is the UK’s further biggest broadband provider with 1.2 million customers. BT is a possible buyer for Tiscali UK.
The consolidation of broadband providers in the UK market is largely due to the intense competition driving down prices. This is putting a lot of pressure on broadband providers who are struggling to turn a profit. We are likely to see more consolidation in the future.
Microsoft is developing a MP3 music player in an attempt to compete with the market leader, the Apple iPod. Microsoft will launch the “Zune” music player in the US in time for Christmas. The first Zune will hold 30GB worth of music and will include a wireless feature where owners can wirelessly transfer music to each other. This feature is not currently available on the iPod.
Zune owners will be able to download music from the Zune marketplace, which will compete with Apple’s iTunes. It will be possible to pay a flat fee to download an unlimited amount of music, or buy songs individually.
Pricing information has not been released yet. It is unclear whether Microsoft will be able to muscle its way into a market that is totally dominated by the Apple iPod. Much of the iPod’s appeal is down to sexy iconic style of the product. It is doubtful that Microsoft will be able to compete with that.
Never heard of Mozilla Firefox? Your probably amongst the 86% of people who still use Internet Explorer to browse the Internet. But there is an alternative and its popularity is on the increase. Welcome Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox started its life as the once famous Netscape browser. Netscape decided to publicly release the code behind its browser in an attempt to combat Internet Explorer. Since then the Mozilla Foundation has developed Firefox to become arguably the best browser around.
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organisation. Firefox is free and open source and features an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, live bookmarking and the ability to add an endless amount of functionality through an array of add-ons. There are also claims that Firefox is a faster browser than Internet Explorer, allowing you to surf the Internet with relative lightning speed.
We have found it to be a pleasant alternative to Internet Explorer. Why not try it for yourself? It is free after all, and all the best things in life come for free!
Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, is proposing to cap mobile termination charges to 5.3 pence per minute. Termination charges are the fees that a mobile operator charges another mobile operator when a customer calls someone on their network. Termination charges are blamed for the relatively high cost of calling a mobile on a different network or calling a mobile from a landline. Ofcom has decided that competition alone is not enough to reduce these charges.
Ofcom and its predecessor, Oftel, has been controlling termination charges since 2004. At that time, a review found that mobile networks were fixing the termination charges and customer had no choice but to use the mobile network that the destination number was on. Vodafone and O2 were not allowed to charge more than 5.63 pence per minute. T Mobile and Orange use a different, more expensive, spectrum and so were allowed to charge a higher rate at 6.31 pence per minute.
Termination charges account for approximately 50% of the cost to call a mobile from a BT landline. Any reduction in these charges is good news for consumers.