Thus slashes SME broadband tariffs

Thus has slashed charges on Demon ISP broadband services for small business, following cuts in BT's wholesale pricing.

Demon Express Plus will be reduced from a monthly fee of £75 to £45 and Demon Express Pro from £150 to £79. In addition, Thus is halving connection costs for both services to £125 even though BT charges for set-up services have not been reduced.

The new pricing structure comes into effect today (May 1).

Thus hopes the price cuts will encourage more SMEs to embrace broadband. However it regrets that it is not able to cut the price of all its business ADSL packages "because of the limited scope of BT wholesale price reduction"s.

Phil Male, chief operating officer of THUS, said: "While we welcome the wholesale price cuts, it is disappointing that we cannot reduce costs for all our business ADSL services."

"BT's price changes relate only to 'IPStream' connections - the wholesale end-to-end service provided by BT Wholesale," he explained.

"BT has not passed on similar price advantages to its 'DataStream' service, which allows service providers to use their own networks to differentiate and add value to the standard services provided by BT Wholesale, furthermore BT has increased some of the infrastructure costs."

Thus has asked the regulator to investigate the disparity in BT's wholesale pricing.

The Demon Express Plus and Demon Express Pro services are designed for small to medium businesses, offering low contention ratios, high downstream bandwidth, unrestricted traffic and always on as well as additional services including email, domain name and web space. Both services are engineer-installed and come supplied with a DSL modem, splitter and router. ®

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