Sky to offer cut price phone line rental!

[NewsreadeR]

It has been rumoured for some time that Sky would be offering their own phone line rental, in competition with BT.

Although we are not sure of all the details, the deal will be £9.00 per month, which is £2.00 per month cheaper than BT.

As far as we know, the lower phone rental will be offered to those customers on an Easynet LLU enabled exchange, and is scheduled to be offered later on this year.

Further details to follow.

[dcclanuk]

thx for the news

[TheWhizzz]

thinks sky r a little peeved with the cable companys by any chance??? looks like war

[Tim1964]

That's good news, saving another £2 to add to the £19 a month I'm saving already.

[murdock]

thinks sky r a little peeved with the cable companys by any chance??? looks like war

And that's one war that is good news for the consumer.
Watch prices fall further.




My Sky BB Max. £10. FRB
Fast, Reliable, Bargain.

[NewsreadeR]

The price war that this news is going to generate between Blueyonder/NTL soon to be rebranded Virgin Media and BT alone, has to be good for everyone who has:

1) Broadband

2) A phone line

3) Satellite / cable TV

Everyone is on for saving money as a consumer, as the big boys battle it out for dominence and market share.

One thing that will be very interesting will be what Virgin Media are going to be offering when they rebrand in the next few weeks. However the downside with a cable company is the lack of investment / cable laying.

At work I sell Blueyonder on a commission, however we make very little as the area where I work has less than 20% coverage. However Sky has 99% and nearly everyone has a phone line.

I would expect to see huge savings for people on Cable, if only to keep people from leaving.

The £26.00 deal from Sky was a masterstroke, in respect of single handedly undercutting them by £4.00 a month. Or to you and me £48.00 a year, in a world where our mortgages have just gone up, every little helps.

Unless Virgin Media can now offer an incentive for Sky customers to switch, imho they are probably flogging a dead horse.

However, I do believe that there are going to be major casualties in the Broadband market within the next 12 months, as all the unspecialised, ununique ISP's lose their customers in the hundreds of 1000's, and I hasten to add umemployment for the staff that work there.

Someone mentioned elsewhere that Sky were looking at buying Pipex, a shrewd move, however they use Tiscali iirc for peering and bandwidth transfer. This alone would put myself off from being a customer and I cannot see it happening. But then again we didn't see the £5.00 Connect package coming either.

[NewsreadeR]

I forgot to add that Blueyonder/NTL/Virgin afaik are looking at doing what Sky are doing, ie renting the ADSLMAX package from BT to give broadband to as many people as possible.

The downside in this is the data transfer or the gb's that us customer's love to download everyday.

Without a doubt it is uneconomical for anyone on ADSLMAX to download over about 10gb of data a month, after taking the rental from BT and the cost per gb to be transferred over their network. This is why Sky traffic shape on Connect and Blueyonder/NTL/Virgin would have to do the same.

I have no idea of the costings for Blueyonder/NTL/Virgin re the ADSLMAX, but obviously this is one way they will be fighting back against Sky. But to be competitve, they are going to have to:

1) Give a free wireless router

2) Less than £5.00 per month

3) Advertise and pass this on

4) A low gb per person CAP per month

All of the above 4 alone would mean a massive loss for Blueyonder/NTL/Virgin Media but as we know Sir Richard has money to burn.

All in all the cost of broadband is going to remain low for everyone, companies would make money from advertising. Hence the reason Sky have signed up with Google.

Is this the real reason Sky are offering £5.00 Connect and cheap phone line rental?

[Alan b]

It certainly is going to be an interesting year ahead for us Sky subscribers...

[sc0tsman]

NewsreadeR, if Blueyonder/NTL/Virgin did do a deal with BT then BT would probably sell at the same rate SKY BB Connect customers were paying £17.

SKY are running at a loss albeit temporary with the £5 connect package as those exchanges will be up and running before July so they can afford it coupled by the fact a lot of punters would not accept the £17 connect.

The moral is a loss now is a gain later even if everyone goes to the BASE pack they must have TV and as said earlier that's were the pennies are

[NewsreadeR]

NewsreadeR, if Blueyonder/NTL/Virgin did do a deal with BT then BT would probably sell at the same rate SKY BB Connect customers were paying £17.

The deal is done already from what I have been told, however how much for the customer to pay I do not know.