ADSL from Freeserve below £30 a month

Get it while you can

By Tim Richardson • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 3rd January 2002 00:14 GMT

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The UK's biggest ISP is offering ADSL for less than £30 a month to help prove that low cost broadband will stoke-up demand.

Trialling the wires-only DIY installation service, Freeserve is offering the service at just £29.99 a month. Punters also have to buy a modem from Freeserve for £99.99.

The trial lasts for 12 months and those who take part can then subscribe to the service for an additional year at the same monthly subscription.

Those who wish to take advantage of the offer must sign up before January 11. Terms and conditions can be found here.

According to adslguide.org.uk, this undercuts current Freeserve ADSL access by around £150 a year.

Freeserve insists, though, that this is just a trial price and that it has not yet decided what the commercial price for the plug and play service should be.

However, it seems Freeserve's aggressive pricing is designed to prove a point.

A spokesman for the ISP said that the price was pitched at this level because "this is the magic number to drive consumer demand" and argued that BT should drop its wholesale price to enable ISPs to tap into this seam of demand.

Earlier this week BT Wholesale confirmed that its wires-only broadband service - which doesn't need an engineer visit to install the product - would be launched on January 15. Not only is it cheaper to install, it also costs less to subscribe to and is tipped to help stimulate demand. ®