BT slashes SDSL charges

efunc · 22nd July 2004

what is the £225 charge they're refering to? monthly fees? what does this mean for lowly customers like me - ie, what's the cheapest i could get an sdsl line for, come october this year?

http://www.netimperative.com/cmn/vie...ews_0000067426

reproduced below:

BT has unveiled a special offer to halve the connection charge to service providers for its range of wholesale symmetric broadband products for businesses.

From October 21 the wholesale connection charge for BT IPStream Symmetric and BT DataStream Symmetric broadband products will be reduced from £450 to £225 for orders completed by 24th February 2005.

SDSL gives the same rate of data transfer upstream as downstream, and is often suited for SMEs, people in remote offices and teleworkers who require fast file transfer, web hosting and multimedia applications.

Wally Freeman, BT Wholesale general manager for broadband products, said: "This special offer is designed to stimulate the take up of SDSL services which are still relatively new products and to encourage more of our service provider customers to add SDSL products to their broadband portfolio.

"The reduction in connection charge will build on our recent announcement that we plan to double the number of exchanges where we offer SDSL in the coming months."

Earlier this month BT Wholesale announced plans to increase the number of exchanges offering symmetric digital subscriber line (SDSL) broadband from 150 to 300.

Cyberprog · 22nd July 2004

This can only be a bad idea for the webhosting industry, we'll see more hosts starting up off a single SDSL line!
On the other hand it might make me ditch my cable connection if they drop the prices low enough...

efunc · 22nd July 2004

LOL, well that's the general idea - not for isps but just me hosting my own website. but unless the cost is about the same as adsl is already i don't really see the point..
i can colo already from about £25 a month, so why pay 10 times that amount for sdsl when it offers less???

othellotech · 23rd July 2004

the *wholesale* connection charge is being reduced - ie.e the price they charge their resellers for teh connection.

That *may* filter down to your connection being cheaper (or may not)

ADSL taking BT as an example, for home will be 512/256 50:1
download at *upto* 512kb
upload at *upto* 256kb
50 different users sharing the pipe (contention)

So if they sell enough of it around your exchange, you actuial could end up simply being 1/50th ofthe 512/256 - i.e. 10.24/5.12 - about 1/8th of the speed of a dialup modem on uploads

Would you risk trying to run a service (even for your own use) on that ?

SDSL is synchronous - same upload and download speeds

It is also 1:1 contended - i.e. you dont share with anyone - so you get the full amount you pay for
for a 1Mb SDSL in London, appx 380/month is the same as a 1mb leased line without the SLA (for half the price)

HTH

Moony1234 · 24th July 2004

Just a little statistic to add onto rob's reply that the AVERAGE contention in any area in the UK is between 16-18:1.

Last time i checked that is :P

Obviously as BB goes more nationwide and gets more popular [which it will] this ratio will go up and you could end up with a slower speed than you expected.

I *think* most ISP's contend it in a different way though, i.e they dont have a 512k line for 50 user's, i think the way they do it is they would have say a 10mbit line for 1,000 users, or a 100mbit line for 10,000 users.

Anyway its 7am and im rambling......