Broadband on order
There has been a lot written about price cuts, local loop unbundling, and the new DSL Max technology ("up to 8mb" as it should properly be called, to avoid any confusion of a guaranteed 8mb service!), and I am sure you can google search it yourself. The announcement from the Carphone Warehouse/TalkTalk of free broadband for everyone – as long as your exchange is LLU-equipped, you give us your phone line and calls to all countries – seemed good, even with an 18 month contract. Naturally, I could see a delay to such a popular offer, but on the MD’s blog, he said if you ordered last weekend, they’d have you up and running by the end of May.
Since I am close enough from the exchange to make DSL Max work (the line checker estimates I could get 8.5mb) I’ve signed up for broadband from EFH, who I shall come to in a minute. The package I’ve got is £3.00 a month more than I currently pay BT for dial up, weighing in at £18.99 for a 15gb usage limit/guideline. But, there’s a flip side, as the BT price I pay is PLUS vat, and this one includes VAT, so I pay BT closer to £18.79… making the difference to jump from 56k to around 100 times that is a mere twenty pence per month! (And, once there are 1.5 million broadband customers via LLU lines, then the price of wholesale broadband drops for everyone, so this is going to go down before it goes up!)
Once the broadband goes in, the “up to 8mb” service – once it’s stabilised after the first week – should be enough to do VoIP (voice over IP), whereby phone calls can be made using your broadband line. Having had a look at Vonage, who supply a voice over IP package for £7.99 a month. This gives you unlimited local or national UK landline calls, plus calls to landlines in the Republic of Ireland. This offers a saving of around £7 when compared with BT Together options 1 and 3 (the difference in price for the basic line service i.e. option 1, and the fully inclusive option 3, being £15.00 per calendar month). But, just like the broadband, there’s an extra incentive. Services such as caller display, ring back etc. are all totally free of charge, and controllable form your online control panel, saving another £5 at least per calendar month. Then, there’s the option of adding a virtual phone number in another country for less than £3 a month, allowing someone there to call you at their local rate i.e. in most US states, local is free.
Back to EFH, and I liked the honesty involved here (EFH stands for Euro Fast Hosts, not the same as another Fasthosts hosting company). Under the FAQ page, it says...
Q. Do you support Mac's?
A. You can, and are quite welcome to, use our service with Mac's. However, to put it bluntly, we only know what we are talking about when it comes to PCs so our support is very limited. We have experience of supporting Mac's for our hosting customers but it's not what you'd call experienced! So, sorry Mac owners - if you know what you are doing, feel free but if not you may need to find someone who does - and you are unlikely to find that someone on the end of our phone line.
i.e. not like a company who claims to, yet doesn’t train staff in them, and can sometimes discipline the staff for over-helping!
So why did I make these choices? Both have a one-month minimum term (the EFH contract states you pay the line enabling fee i.e. £45 if you leave within 12 months), and show the way the nature of the comms market is changing, whilst still giving me the opportunity to take a better deal, or go elsewhere if it all goes t*ts=up!
Since I am close enough from the exchange to make DSL Max work (the line checker estimates I could get 8.5mb) I’ve signed up for broadband from EFH, who I shall come to in a minute. The package I’ve got is £3.00 a month more than I currently pay BT for dial up, weighing in at £18.99 for a 15gb usage limit/guideline. But, there’s a flip side, as the BT price I pay is PLUS vat, and this one includes VAT, so I pay BT closer to £18.79… making the difference to jump from 56k to around 100 times that is a mere twenty pence per month! (And, once there are 1.5 million broadband customers via LLU lines, then the price of wholesale broadband drops for everyone, so this is going to go down before it goes up!)
Once the broadband goes in, the “up to 8mb” service – once it’s stabilised after the first week – should be enough to do VoIP (voice over IP), whereby phone calls can be made using your broadband line. Having had a look at Vonage, who supply a voice over IP package for £7.99 a month. This gives you unlimited local or national UK landline calls, plus calls to landlines in the Republic of Ireland. This offers a saving of around £7 when compared with BT Together options 1 and 3 (the difference in price for the basic line service i.e. option 1, and the fully inclusive option 3, being £15.00 per calendar month). But, just like the broadband, there’s an extra incentive. Services such as caller display, ring back etc. are all totally free of charge, and controllable form your online control panel, saving another £5 at least per calendar month. Then, there’s the option of adding a virtual phone number in another country for less than £3 a month, allowing someone there to call you at their local rate i.e. in most US states, local is free.
Back to EFH, and I liked the honesty involved here (EFH stands for Euro Fast Hosts, not the same as another Fasthosts hosting company). Under the FAQ page, it says...
Q. Do you support Mac's?
A. You can, and are quite welcome to, use our service with Mac's. However, to put it bluntly, we only know what we are talking about when it comes to PCs so our support is very limited. We have experience of supporting Mac's for our hosting customers but it's not what you'd call experienced! So, sorry Mac owners - if you know what you are doing, feel free but if not you may need to find someone who does - and you are unlikely to find that someone on the end of our phone line.
i.e. not like a company who claims to, yet doesn’t train staff in them, and can sometimes discipline the staff for over-helping!
So why did I make these choices? Both have a one-month minimum term (the EFH contract states you pay the line enabling fee i.e. £45 if you leave within 12 months), and show the way the nature of the comms market is changing, whilst still giving me the opportunity to take a better deal, or go elsewhere if it all goes t*ts=up!
posted by Suzy Scott @ 16:25
2 Comments:
Hi Suzy,
One thing you missed out on your post, is, although you can use VOIP with your new broadband connection, the TalkTalk offer included FREE local, national and international calls to 28 countries!! So no need to turn on your PC to use VOIP :)
Also.. talking of VOIP I'd use Skype as it's free :)
Cheers,
Chris
Hi Chris, thanks for the comments. Do you work for a certain company in North Acton :-P Anyway, re your points, yes it did include all the countries - I only call UK and USA, but strangely it didn't seem over-the-top to me. The 18 month contract put me off just a little - but only because so much is changing, as well as the lead time. I had TalkTalk on my line a few years ago before I went to OneTel - now that was a mistake in itself! Skype gives you free pc-to-pc calls, as do several other programs I have, but you still have to pay for calls to 01xxx/02xxx landlines. regards, Suzy
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