BT has made a cash offer of £67 million to buy broadband provider Plusnet. If accepted, Plusnet will remain as a separate brand. Plusnet has over 200,000 broadband customers.
This is yet another example of a rapidly consolidating market with bigger providers continuing to swallow up smaller ones.
Orange and TalkTalk have lost ground in a customer satisfaction survey released by uSwitch. They came joint bottom in the survey for overall customer satisfaction.
TalkTalk scored highly in the last uSwitch survey in May. Since then, it has revolutionised the industry by being the first to offer free broadband. However, customers are less than impressed with some customers not being connected and unable to get through to the customer support help lines.
Orange has suffered with outages to its broadband service.
Telewest scored very well and came top in quality of connection, customer services, billing, and tech support. Its sister company, NTL, did less well and finished 8th overall.
Virgin.net came top of the survey overall.
Vodafone has announced that it will offer a broadband and home phone bundle, called At Home. For £25 per month, you will receive an 8Mb broadband service, all your UK phone calls and a 25% discount on mobile calls. You must be a Vodafone mobile customer to get the deal for £25 per month. If not, it will cost £35 per month. The Vodafone At Home package will be available in January 2007.
Vodafone joins a number of big name brands, such as Orange, Sky, Carphone Warehouse and BT who are battling it out in the broadband sector by offering very competitive bundled packages.
Sky Broadband is exceeding expectations with more than 113,000 new orders and more than 1 million people expressing an interest in the service. The Sky Broadband service was launched in August of this year as Sky moved into offering the “triple play” products: broadband, digital TV and home phone.
The battle in the market now seems to be focused on the big companies like Sky, BT, NTL:Telewest and Orange. All of these companies offer multiple packages services.
Sky has extended it digital TV special offer until Nov 30th. You can get Sky TV half price for the first three months and packages from £7.50 per month (£15 thereafter).
To find out more, visit Sky’s website
Dell has a range of special offers available on desktop computers and laptops, including a stellar deal on the Dimension 3100:
Dimension 3100
This deal ends Nov 1st.
Orange has launched a new set of broadband deals. The free broadband offer is continued for customers with an Orange mobile. The mobile monthly line rental must be over £30 per month to qualify. The free broadband is on Orange Broadband Starter and is 2Mb with a 2GB monthly download cap.
The new products are:
Broadband Starter
Broadband Unlimited
The Livebox is a wireless router, allowing you to connect up to 6 computers to your broadband connection and make phone calls over the internet by connecting your normal phone to the Livebox.
NTL:Telewest are planning on selling their triple offering of broadband, home phone, digital television and mobile phones through Virgin stores next year. The merged company of NTL, Telewest and Virgin Mobile will be re-branded under the Virgin name. Part of the deal allows the products to be sold in Virgin’s 120 high street stores.
This will allow NTL:Telewest to really take on the likes of the Carphone Warehouse. It is also seen as a reversal of the trend for businesses to move their sales functions online.
Skype is offering 6 months of free calls to UK landline to users who buy Skype Credit for international or mobile calls before Dec 31st. This includes calls to landlines in Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
Skype is one of the worlds leading voice of internet (VoIP) providers. Calls are carried over the internet rather than traditional telephone lines.
O2 has dramatically cut the cost of making and receiving calls while roaming overseas. You can now call the UK from Spain on your UK mobile for 25 pence per minute. A “high roamer” service is to be introduced, where incoming calls will be free for a £5 per month fee. This is available on O2 sister network in Spain, Movistar. O2 is going to extend the cut price roaming to 35 international destinations, including the rest of the EU.
The EU has recently been critical of mobile firms across Europe for over charging customer who are roaming outside of their home country. O2 had previously had some of the highest roaming charges.
We hope this move by O2 will be followed the other mobile operators in order to cut the cost of using your mobile while abroad.
