More than 16,000 punters have signed up to BT's faster 1Mbps ADSL service since the product was launched a month ago.

News of the growing appetite for faster broadband services came as the telco announced it is to cut the wholesale cost of some of its broadband products in the New Year.

The offer, which runs from January 12 to April 30, means that the wholesale cost of upgrading to BT IPStream Home 1000 service will fall by £10 from £35 to £25. BT also claims to have also simplified the upgrade process for its 1Mbps ADSL service.

Separately, BT is also halving the connection costs of a number of its wholesale "Datastream" products from £50 to £25 up to the end of April. DataStream products (Tiscali's 150k ADSL service is a Datastream product, for example) enable operators to use their own network to provide a broadband service.

In both cases, the cuts have been made at the wholesale level. It's up to ISPs to pass on those cost savings (or not, as the case may be) to end-users.

Indeed, Tiscali sounds like it may well be prepared to pass on those savings to punters.

Here's what Tiscali's ISP exec, Steve Horley, had to say: "This is good news, Tiscali has been lobbying for a reduction of the activation fee for some time, and we still believe it can go lower if based on a 'Cost Plus' model.

"We have recently reduced the price for our 512kbps
to £24.99 a month (free activation and free modem) and we will be introducing similar competitive promotions for other products in January - watch this space." ®

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