BT! and! Yahoo! in! dial-up! makeover!

BT and Yahoo! are to start selling dial-up services together. The duo already jointly flog ADSL under the BT Yahoo! Broadband brand.

From today, BT Openworld's narrowband services are now succinctly called "BT Yahoo! Anytime" (its unmetered service) and "BT Yahoo! Pay-as-you-go" (its pay-as-you-go service, obviously).

Anyhow, the new dial-up package includes anti-spam and email virus protection stuff, and marks another stage in a working agreement between the two outfits.

The rebranding is to be accompanied by a £10 million advertising deal.

Elsewhere, BT is still basking in the glow of getting a mention in the PM's speech yesterday, a pat on the back from Mr Blair concerning the dominant telco's goal of getting blanket ADSL reach by 2005.

But while much of the attention is focused on 100 per cent coverage, many industry players says that this is not the big barrier to broadband take-up.

Over to Steve Horley, a senior exec at ISP Tiscali UK, to summarise the contrarian opinion. "The idea of 100 per cent coverage is good and will help particularly rural communities unable to get broadband. But the current problem is that high availability on its own will not necessarily stimulate adoption - in the UK we currently have 80 per cent availability but only 9 per cent adoption.

"Today the key barriers to uptake are the high monthly fee and the up-front costs.

"Wholesale pricing must be addressed so that pricing generally can be lowered to stimulate mass market adoption.

"Moving forward if all that the industry has achieved in 2005 is 100 per cent coverage, but still comparatively low adoption - then that's failure not success." ®

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