Neowin.net

Today BT have announced, finally, that they will be cutting the cost of their R/ADSL broadband. The cost to ISPs will now be under £15 a month but the consumer will be paying £25-£30.

At the same time struggling NTL have announced that there will be a new 1 Mbps 'Gold Tier' service offering 1024kbps down and 256kbps up stream, compared to the ‘Silver Tier’ service this is a huge leap as that only achieved 512kbps down and 128kbps up stream. At first, they have said, this won't be available everywhere the ‘Silver’ service is, but eventually they hope to offer it to all their customers. More information will follow from NTL.

The changes to the R/ADSL price will take place on 1st April, and hopefully it will not be an April fools joke! The pricing isn't unreasonable for competition from firms like Telewest, NTL and Tele2 but it does mean that many more people will use the BT service and how BT will cope is questionable. Their hopes are high at achieving a large number of customers but in order to cope their customer services and bandwidth will have to be improved. The chief executive of BT said today:

"We plan to hit one million ADSL broadband connections by summer 2003, a huge step up from today's figure of 145,000 connections. We will drive for two million in 2004, and about 5 million by 2006 - which means a quarter of UK households connected to broadband within four years. We're aiming high - and we need to."

News source: ISP Review

The change was presaged by Sun's withdrawal of the 6.0 beta at the end of 2001, which Sun at the time explained by saying it had enough information.

Charging could undermine Sun's anti-Microsoft campaign. With a free StarOffice, Sun has been able to argue that it's offering a way around the "Microsoft tax," the cost of buying Microsoft products essential to business, said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky.

But a price tag on StarOffice would mean "they lose the ability to use this as an attack weapon" against Microsoft, Kusnetzky said.

Sun also could alienate Linux users--customers Sun has been courting in its battle to undermine Microsoft.

"Bearing in mind that there is not exactly an overwhelming demand for Linux on the desktop, charging for the Linux version will mean that they will basically get no money from that direction," wrote one reader at the Slashdot.org "news for nerds" discussion site. "It's a bad idea because Sun is a competitor of Microsoft, and Linux is challenging Microsoft for the desktop, and your enemy's enemy is your friend."

Others wrote, however, that they'd be willing to pay for StarOffice, as long as it isn't too expensive.

The source familiar with Sun's plan said a likely price range was between $50 and $100, though many details remain unsettled.

Others said they'd still use OpenOffice, the open-source version of StarOffice that Sun launched in 2000.

One key difference between OpenOffice and StarOffice is in spell checking. OpenOffice comes with spell-checking software but not a dictionary, though one can be downloaded. Other features missing from OpenOffice are some Asian fonts, the Adabas personal database, clip art and some filters for importing files from other software products.

Sun's free StarOffice plan was hatched in the days of the Internet business boom, when Sun was riding high, Linux was heavily hyped and investors had patience with money-losing strategies that could pay off in the long term.

Now things are much grimmer, with companies looking for every cost-cutting move possible. Sun likely was seeking ways to charge for intellectual property, Kusnetzky said. "My suspicion is their revenue stream has not been as strong as they would like," he said.

In the overall office-suite market, Microsoft has the vast majority of the revenue--about 93 percent--Kusnetzky said. Among Linux users though, StarOffice's popularity increases, he said.

Sun's move could boost the fortunes of other Linux software suites, such as AbiWord, Koffice and VistaSource's AnywareOffice.