Wholesale access in Hull area just got cheaper
Monday 17 March 2008 10:31:11 by Andrew Ferguson
In the past Kingston Communications has been criticised over the price it charged for wholesale access to its broadband network in the Hull area. The Hull Daily Mail reports that KCom has slashed the price of its wholesale broadband to match or undercut what BT Wholesale charges in the rest of the country.
"Our wholesale broadband prices are reviewed annually.
Due to increases in our customer numbers, our costs per customer have been reduced and we are able to reduce the broadband prices.
These reductions mean we now provide a framework of wholesale pricing at the same level or cheaper than BT's.
We have always said we would welcome competition in the area and believe the changes announced today demonstrate our continued commitment to providing an open network for other ISPs to offer services."Comments from KCom spokeswoman
The newspaper article refers to the basic price of an IPStream Max connection at £7.63, but neglects to mention the costs of the BT Central component. The cost of getting the data from the telephone exchange to where the provider can hook it into their own network is important and often is what dictates the actual customer experience. A provider charging £15 a month and offering an unlimited service is probably going to have a much more variable speed than one offering a specific 30GB allowance costing £30 a month.
Hopefully the future will bring more enhancements to the Hull area with BT Wholesale getting close to rolling out ADSL2+. If KCom does not start to offer a faster DSL product soon it will start to look dated.
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Well let's hope the new prices appeal to someone, preferably someone like Entanet or BT Wholesale so everyone can get in :)
Personally i think they should be congratulated for slashing the price, people here have often moaned about Kingston, will the same moaners also say well done??
It's not that much of a "slash" - if you look at the current residential port rental price of £108+VAT per year, it has only been lowered by £12 to around £96+VAT per year :)
Actually, unless KC drastically reduce their backhaul aggregation charges no one will touch Hull exchanges, as the price for the 155Mbit and 622Mbit Centrals are practically the same price as BT. Who would pay those prices to gain access to %1 of the UK lines...
quote"It's not that much of a "slash" - if you look at the current residential port rental price of £108+VAT per year, it has only been lowered by £12 to around £96+VAT per year :)"
An extra pound in your pocket if you are that worried about prices is a good thing, not many services you will find that slash monthly rental prices by that 10%.
The problem with using KCOM wholesale is that you're buying a Central type connection just to connect to customers in the Hull area, unless you use their internet transit.
This doesn't seem to appeal to ISPs, presumably because of the small scale economics.