By Graeme Wearden, 27 April 2004 09:00
NEWS NTL has followed UK cable rival Telewest in announcing a major hike in the speed of its broadband service – while leaving the price where it is.
Shortly after Telewest's announcement yesterday, NTL declared it is also rejigging its broadband portfolio. Its entry level service will increase from 150Kbps to 300Kbps; its mid-tier offering is being upped from 600Kbps to 750Kbps, while its high-end service will move from 1Mbps to 1.5Mbps.
Aizad Hussain, managing director of NTL's residential services business, said: "We look forward to continue delivering on our twin goals of customer centricity and strong broadband growth through 2004 and beyond."
Telewest and NTL will be hoping that their beefed up product offerings will allow them to compete more effectively against other high speed services to the home. After several years of strong performance, the UK's cable sector has recently started to lag behind BT's ADSL in terms of consumer take-up.
Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. Rob
I wondered why a download lastnight was reporting 1.3Mb, definite improvement, now if NTL could just keep their HTTP traffic flowing for more than a month without downtime that would be an even better improvement.
2. Jason
Good News on the download bandwidth. Now, if they could just increase their paltry upload speeds on the mid-range service, I'd be much happier. I mean, 128K? come on...
3. anonymous
Faster is nice; Consistent reliability would be nicer.
Upping the peak speed by 50% is nice, but driving the connection reliably, and consistently at the older speed 100% of the time would be better than 50% faster with breaks in the connections.
I don't mind a large download taking 3 hours if I can rely on it completing -
I just do something else for the 3 hours.
A 2 hour download that fails after 1½ hours, and again after another hour, is a 4½ hour process, and I have had to monitor it to restart it as soon as it fails - or
I could come back to the system 2 hours after each time I start it - so 2 failures would make it a 6 hour process.
4. alfred
Bandwidth received depends on the server. I get emails from ntl at about 5000char/sec on a claimed 600kbs connection. This is about the same as I used to get on a 56k modem. I wonder if they will improve this on a 750kbs feed.
5. Allan Shriver
NTL - <b>Not Two Lane</b> broadband: ...but One-Way-Only broadband: 512k download and 128k (?!) upload 'broadband' is like having a one-lane motorway on which you can drive 70mph one-way only! Not much cop! And can you imagine a phone service where one party hears the other in real time, while the other party waits several seconds before hearing the reply? Forget ADSL and default to all SDSL!!!
6. David C M Hazel
Shame they are not upping the 600k by the same ammount as the base and the 1meg link. Another Example of NTL trying to sell Up.