BT Retail reduces price of Infinity to ADSL2+ levels
Friday 16 December 2011 11:10:06 by Andrew Ferguson

Marketing of superfast broadband is perhaps something of a black art with varying degrees of success around the world, and BT Retail by aligning its fibre to the cabinet service prices with the old technology (oddly still called next generation in press releases) ADSL2+ is trying ensure that even a slight price increase does not deter signups.

BT Infinity products was already one of the cheapest FTTC solutions in the UK, and with these price reductions of 60p to £2 at the retail level the change looks more incremental than ground breaking. The idea we presume is that if the up to 20 Mbps products and up to 40 Mbps products are the same price then consumers will simply elect for the bigger number product that costs the same.

One problem that faces marketing departments, is that after ten years of 'up to' marketing, it may be the consumer has started to ignore these claims, and is judging the figures based on flawed logic. For example, the upgrades from ADSL to ADSL2+ for the vast majority produced nothing like the tripling of speeds that the marketing material and press coverage suggested. There is an irony here, in that with the removal of a large chunk of copper from the product, that FTTC actually is offering speeds generally at the or above the speeds estimated for a particular line.

If anyone at BT Retail is reading this, can we suggest you make the Free connection and £25 Activation charge clearer in terms of what each of them are, connection it seems is referring to people who want a telephone line installed for the service, but £25 activation refers to the Infinity service itself.