NTL Trial PAYG/Prepay and Turbo Broadband

[rbanksy]

Recruitment for the Guildford technology trials has been going on for some time now, and this recruitment closed a couple of days ago. After much fevered debate on the nthellworld forums about what ntl:home were trialling, news has now leaked out.

We can reveal that ntl:home are trialling various types of Pay As You Go and Prepay broadband services. Exactly what you pay for is based on a bandwidth model rather than a time spent online model.

Also on trial are two other interesting new products known as 1Mb Xtreme, a Broadband on Demand package, and HomeWorker, a variable bandwidth product based on time of day.

The packages being trialled are:

Pay As You Go

? PAYG 150 and 150+ (boostable to 1Mbit)

? PAYG 600 and 600+ (boostable to 2Mbit)

Both the standard tier and the Plus tier have a "Turbo Button" to boost the speed to the either 1Mbit or 2Mbit. It has also been revelaed that "credits" will run out quicker on a standard rather than Plus service. The difference between the standard and Plus is unclear at the moment, although one logical guess would be more bandwidth allowance is included with the Plus service.

1Mb Xtreme

This has a similar "Turbo Button" feature to enable speeds up to 3Mbit, but this speed is restricted by time of day and to certain hours of the day. As ntl are already suffering network congestion in some areas and have recently started sending out "Cap" letters, we assume that this 3Mbit speed will be limited to something like 12am to 4pm and the download limits will still apply.

HomeWorker

This applies to customers on on 150Kbps and 600Kbps services, where they will receive a speed of 1Mbit from 0800-1800 Mon-Fri, which will return to their normal speed at other times.

It has also been revealed that all "enhanced" services whether 1Mbit, 2Mbit or 3Mbit, will have a maximum upstream of 256Kbps.

Peter M, from ntl's Internet Product Development, said: "The trial is about finding out if these work in principle so the final version of the products (if any come from the trial) will be based on the findings and experiences of the participating Triallists."

There is an ongoing debate in our forum about the benefits of these new services. Some welcome the trial, while others are more skeptical, believing that this is a move towards metered broadband.

It was two years ago this April 1st when we broke a news story on nthellworld.com that ntl were introducing metered broadband. This was of course a well written April Fools Day joke by Craig which resulted in significant incoming calls to ntl call centres from unhappy customers believing that ntl were introducing metered broadband.

We didn't expect our April Fools Day joke to come true, but metered broadband seems one step closer, at least for ntl:home customers.

Source: NTHELLWORLD.CO.UKNTL