Thousands of students will be able to hook up broadband from this September for £5 a week following a deal between accommodation outfit The Unite Group and BT.

The new service will be made available to 15,000 students from the Autumn. Called 'uBroadband', it will replace the dial-up service currently wired into Unite's student digs.

Details of the service remain patchy. Although the package on offer runs at speeds up to 512k and comes with no set-up fees, it's not known if uBroadband has a usage cap or if students have to supply their own connection kit.

No one from Unite - the UK's largest provider of accommodation for students - was available for comment at the time of writing.

Said Unite chief exec Nicholas Porter in a statement: "Our research shows that some 70 per cent of our customers want a value for money high-speed broadband service available in their rooms, and this is just what we've set out to do, with BT as the ideal partner." ®

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