BT IRELAND has upped the stakes in the broadband market with the announcement of a new high-speed service that will be available to 330,000 homes and businesses by the end of September.
The service, which is based on ADSL 2+ technology, will provide speeds of up to 24Mbits/sec to homes and businesses and will cost €42.50 a month including VAT. Eircom's fastest offering is a 12Mbits/sec service costing €204.49 a month. There will be no download limits and subscribers will be able to access as much content as they want every month at no additional cost.
BT will only take action when heavy downloading is affecting other customers, said BT's product director Peter Evans.
Initially, the faster speeds will be available in 16 exchanges - Tallaght, Dún Laoghaire, Dolphins Barn, Dublin North Main, Terenure, Merrion (Dublin 2), Crown Alley (Temple Bar), Beggars Bush, Swords, Clondalkin, Summerhill (Dublin north inner city), Blanchardstown, Naas, Dooradoyle (Limerick), Navan and Kilkenny city.
BT said it would upgrade a further six exchanges: Douglas and Ballincollig in Cork; Whitehall, Belcamp, and Foxrock (Dublin); and Greystones (Wicklow). BT will take advantage of local loop unbundling (LLU), which enables other operators to place their equipment in Eircom telephone exchanges and take control of the copper phone lines into their subscribers' premises. Mr Evans said the priority now was to get its customers in these exchanges, which it is serving with a resold product from Eircom, onto its own next-generation network.
The European Commission has mandated the introduction of LLU in member states to enable new players to compete with incumbent operators. In Ireland, its introduction has been beset by delays and challenges by Eircom.
Mr Evans said new wholesale products introduced by Eircom last year, combined with "good signals" from regulator ComReg on LLU, had prompted BT's decision to invest now. ComReg is currently engaged in an industry review of LLU pricing.
This week, an Eircom challenge to a ComReg decision on pricing for a particular LLU product was admitted to the list of the Commercial Court and will be heard on December 16th next.
Mr Evans said the rest of the market would be offering services with a similar speed and no download cap within the next 18-24 months "so we decided to jump now rather than wait".
