Prices drops and price increases from providers

With BT Openreach increasing prices relating to the fully unbundled products TalkTalk uses, which has caused a lot of complaints to be raised by the telco, is now seems that 1st April 2009 is the date set for these changes to take place.

There will be an increase from £10.50 a month to £11.25 for line rental with TalkTalk and a rise to 4.5p per minute for daytime calls and where applicable there will be an increase to 8p per minute for call connection charges. A penalty for any broadband user who exceeds their 40GB monthly usage limit will also be introduced as well. It is advised that if users get close to their allowance limit they should take advantage of the 40GB extra allowance offered by TalkTalk at a cost of £4.

With the use of traffic management of reduce the impact cause by peer-to-peer traffic the average TalkTalk broadband customer uses about 2.5GB per month, although this could increase rapidly to around 5 to 7GB a month with the increased popularity of video streaming online. Because of this the penalty is unlikely to affect most users but it is expected that TalkTalk will notify its customer if they are getting close to exceeding their limit due to the Broadband code of practice.

According to a popular broadband news site Virgin Media has planned to change its broadband packages as of 1st May 2009 even though the change in price from BT Openreach will not affect any of its cable broadband products. Its M package will increase by £2 per month although this is no longer marketed, the L package price will go down by £4 and its XL product will see a £1 per month reduction. It is however unclear how this will fit into its plans to move its M customers who are on 2Mbps to the faster 10Mbps L package as of May 2009.

Anyone who wants paper bills in future will need to be aware that they will be charged an extra £1.25, although this charge can be avoided by opting for online billing. It will also be dropping its charges for itemised billing.

This increase in price by BT Openreach will be quite small and can most likely be absorbed by broadband providers who use shared LLU, which will be the majority of providers who offer LLU services. There will be a chance of a 50p per month in order to cover the price increases by Openreach for anyone who has moved their line rental away from BT and over to companies like the Post Office, Sky, Plusnet, Madasafish, and any others who use Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) products.