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Virgin cuts broadband to a fiver

But O2 wants to make you happy

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Virgin is to cut its wireless offering to a fiver a month for broadband customers who want to go wireless, but O2 reckons ten per cent of wireless broadband users feel mis-sold anyway, and reckons only they can guarantee happiness.

Clearly stung by our assertion that Virgin Mobile Broadband was a rather lacklustre offering compared to its carrying network T-Mobile, the company has dropped the cost of wireless broadband to a fiver a month for punters getting Virgin at home. If you're already getting Virgin broadband on the "XL" or "L" package then you can add wireless for only a fiver a month. Other customers will have to stump up a tenner for the same 1GB service.

But O2 has released research that one in ten mobile broadband users claim they were missold their connection, with 20 per cent not getting the expected coverage, 13 per cent wanting a better returns policy and half of them wanting Wi-Fi hotspot access bundled.

One can't help wondering if O2's research was slightly slanted, seeing as it does offer bundled Wi-Fi and has just launched a better coverage-checker, and its "Happiness Guarantee" allows buyers to cancel a connection within 50 days. O2 is also going to switch off international data-roaming by default from now on, so customers will have to request the ability to run up massive bills downloading movies while abroad.

But accurate coverage checking can only be a good thing, and money-back guarantees equally so, as coverage checking isn't an exact science. Bundled access to Wi-Fi hotspots should be irrelevant, if the 3G coverage is good enough, but having spent so much money putting hotspots in place operators like O2 have to extract some value from them. ®

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Latest Comments

cable lying costs

cable through sewers does not cost so much, and it has been done in a few cities in the UK.

Also, eight years ago I visited a friend in Amsterdam who already used fibre optic at a ridiculously cheap rate without caps.

Why can't we do what the Dutch were doing years ago is beyond my understanding.. Maybe having had to reclaim flood plains made them more enterprising

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And how many are handling Linux?

Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML

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Anonymous Coward

@AC - Cable for New Builds

I could be wrong but I read that the cost of laying in the standard utilities is the responsibility of the developer. In exactly the same way that they have to pay for the roads, street lighting etc. they have to pay for the installation and connection of water, drains, electricity, etc. However cable was never added to that list of standard utilities so developers don't want to pay for it and the cable providers (OK Virgin) are reluctan to pay since the other utilities don't have to pay.

Or at least that's the way I read it.

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