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By Ben King, 19 July 2002 17:05

NEWS BT Wholesale hopes to increase interest in its broadband registration scheme with a multi-million pound marketing budget. At the start of the month BT initiated a programme to allow would-be broadband customers in areas not ADSL-enabled to register their interest in receiving the service. BT presented the intiative as a major boost for broadband roll-out, but critics were quick to point out that the scheme would effectively commit BT to the smallest possible investment it could get away with. BT set "trigger levels" for the amount of customer interest it would require before it invested in broadband equipment in an exchange - between 200 and 500 users. However, at the time of writing, the most popular exchange had only received 56 confirmed orders for broadband, and no other exchange had more than 10 per cent of the demand required - though the scheme is already in its third week. Some of this lack of demand is down to internet service providers failing to pass requests on in a timely manner, a BT spokeswoman claimed. Freeserve is thought to be among them. Rather than taking the requests itself BT has been requiring would-be customers to sign up via an ISP, and they have been slow to pass their orders on, she claimed, making the published figures lower than actual demand levels. She said: "We launched the scheme as soon as we could and it has taken a while to get all the ISPs to sign up to it. These figures represent teething troubles rather than a lack of demand." Nonetheless, BT's wholesale division has made a new sum of money, estimated to be in the "low millions", available to add to its existing marketing funds to boost the scheme. The money will be spent on additional advertising for the registration scheme, and a targeted advertising campaign dedicated to alerting business to the benefits of broadband. Some of the money will also be added to BT's existing fund for marketing grants, whereby it gives money to ISPs to support their own advertising campaigns for their services.