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| NTL unveil broadband speed increase |
| Monday, April 26, 2004 at 17:54 by Laurence Norah |
Following on from the announcement by Telewest earlier on today to increase broadband speeds by 50% at no cost to end users, the UK arm of ntl which also provides a cable broadband service to around a million residential customers has unveiled speed hikes in its broadband services sector.
Unlike Telewest, which increased the speeds of it's 512k, 1Mb and 2Mb services by 50%, ntl are increasing the speeds of their 150Kbps, 600Kbps and 1Mb services, but not at uniform levels.
At the 150Kbps point, ntl are doubling the speed to 300Kbps whilst still keeping the price at £17.99. The 600Kbps service is being increased to 750Kbps for £24.99 while at the higher end of their offering the 1Mb service is to be increased to 1.5Mb at £37.99.
The most interesting increase we feel is the doubling of the lower end product from 150Kbps to 300Kbps. This speed is enough to stream broadband quality video over the internet, whilst still being at a low enough price point to tempt current dial up users.
Chief Executive Officer of ntl, Simon Duffy, had the following to say about the speed increase:
Our enhancement of the broadband product range is focused on customer needs. Our customers want more speed, better email access and more newsgroups to enjoy, and that's what we're delivering. Our broadband services are faster, better and cheaper than those of our rivals. Over 35% of our total customers buy broadband from us, the highest in the UK. We are continuing to invest in maintaining our first-mover advantage established years ago when broadband was in its infancy.
Marketing speak aside, cheaper broadband is never a bad thing. It will be interesting to see what reaction, if any, this will garner from the ADSL providers. A bit of healthy competition usually works out well for the end user.
We'll keep our eyes peeled for any further developments and let you know if they happen.
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| Yipee, 1.5mb for me then!
I could even downgrade to 750kb and save a tenner a month or so and still be kicking ass on Xbox live. |
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| probably not the sort of response ntl are looking for :) |
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| I think they are only upgrading the download stream, so hosting stuff on X-box live may still not be the greatest! |
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| nice...
now we just need to get ADSL providers to pull their fingers out too ..
*strokes his ADSL router*
...*sigh* |
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| Yeah it would be nice to see the specifics. I am on 1mb and certainly woulnt mind the download boost but what is going to happen to the upload? 30kb/s isn't very good is it! |
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| But what are the upload speeds to be running at ??? Surely they cant leave you with 1.5megs down and only 256 up ? |
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| I have recently joined Ntl and am pleased with the 750 downstream but if they really want to impress their customers they should increase the upstream. I personally would have preferred them to have left the downstream at 600 and increased the upstream from 128 to 256 |
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| i need more upstream to be able to host a room on xbox live , at the moment it is not enough by half |
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