We have recently seen more and more seemingly "amazing" offers becoming available to customers when it comes to broadband and it looks like the start of a broadband price war, but we want to know if it is actually a good thing or not?
The Carphone Warehouse started it off last month by announcing that they were going to offer customers "free broadband forever" up to 8mb speed, unlimited local & national calls and unlimited international calls to 28 countries all for just £20.99 per month (including the cost of the line rental)!
Although there were some complaints about the offer of "free broadband forever" due to the fact that it could be pulled whenever Talk Talk stop this deal it lay down the gauntlet to other broadband providers to make their deals more attractive.
This was followed by BISCIT broadband offering their own freeMAX service of 720 free calls, line rental and broadband for just £21.75 per month.
Since then we have heard rumours about other companies looking to offer more combined deals and packages, such as Orange (who are re-branding their Wanadoo broadband to Orange broadband), NTL who have bought Virgin Mobile so they can offer up to 4 combined services (broadband, Digital TV, telephone & mobile), SKY are reportedly set to launch their own broadband offering this year that is set to rival that from Talk Talk, also there have been rumours about O2 & Vodafone looking to buy an existing broadband provider too.
Although we may think that lower prices are all good and what is there to worry about it all depends on if the offers the broadband providers are offering are sustainable or not.
If they are not we could find that the broadband providers are making a loss on the deals they are offering just so they can get a larger market share in the broadband/communications market. Once they have a large share they can then in a few years change offers and we could see prices start to rise again as they try to start making their money.
Another issue we could possibly face is a lack of investment in developing further technologies and we find ourselves not advancing the technology we have but staying static and just using what we have. We could find we don’t get to see Fibre to the Home (FTTH) that is considered the ultimate for broadband and better than ADSL & ADSL2+ that we currently have available as bandwidth on the fibre optic cable can be much greater and speeds too.
The real thing for consumers to watch out for is to read terms and conditions of any deals carefully and also if you find in a few years that the deal you signed up for is not as attractive as it once was with various restructures of the offerings not to be scared to change broadband providers.
The Carphone Warehouse started it off last month by announcing that they were going to offer customers "free broadband forever" up to 8mb speed, unlimited local & national calls and unlimited international calls to 28 countries all for just £20.99 per month (including the cost of the line rental)!
