Free broadband from The Carphone Warehouse?

[Bob Crabtree]

A free broadband service from The Carphone Warehouse, the UK's leading mobile phone retailer, will be announced this week according to the BBC and mobiletoday.co.uk. Satellite TV broadcaster BSkyB - owner of the Easynet internet service provider - is also expected to launch a Sky-branded broadband service, though not until later this year.

The Carphone Warehouse's free broadband service is thought likely to be available only to those who subscribe to Talk Talk - the landline phone service set up after the company's recent take over of Onetel.

Talk Talk currently offers unlimited 2MB broadband for £17.99 per month and its landline phone deals (£10.49; £14.48; and £19.48 per month) undercut BT and allow life-long free calls to other Talk Talk landline users.

More in this HEXUS.headline.

[XA04]

Yeah saw it on the news yesterday, you need to sign up for there landline Talk Talk plan, and you get free broadband. There will probably be some sort of catch though.. Anyone used Talk Talk before?

[nvening]

Probably a 1gb download limit, mabe 1 meg?

[Bob Crabtree]

I've just updated the story.

The Independent reckons that the service will be 1MB and free only for three months, after which it will cost a knock-down £4.99 per month.

And, if you now go to the TalkTalk you'll see that it says that the site is relaunching and to come back tomorrow when you should, "Prepare to be AMAZED!!"

[XA04]

Zvery itervesting.

[DR]

Trouble is most people have broadband already - so why bother?

I can see it a final step up for people who didn't want to pay much for it.... but I wouldn't move for it

[DeludedGuy]

Im currently with Talk Talk, if this is true, I will be switching over.

[gman1981]

There website has re-launched now:http://www.talktalk.co.uk

Looks like the service isn't free as such because you have to sign up to the £11 pm line rental and £9.99 pm talk plan

Although the talk plan includes unlimited calls and the broadband is up to 8mbps with 40Gb bandwidth. This would be good if you used your landline a lot to make calls.

[Swafe]

its 512 and 1gb capped apparently, and if you go over its so many quid per mb, good for occasional browsers, but anyone who uses it for a fair whack wont be saving much

[nichomach]

Update:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04...one_broadband/

To take up the offer punters must subscribe to Carphone's TalkTalk fixed line phone service. For £9.99 a month, punters get unlimited local and national landline calls, unlimited international landline calls to 28 countries and up to 8 meg broadband access.

In addition to the monthly fee, customers are also faced with paying a monthly line rental charge of £11.00. The total cost of line rental, calls and broadband is just £20.99 a month...

...Anyone signing up to the service is also tied in to an 18 month contract, must adhere to a 40 gig a month download limit and shell out a one-off £30 connection fee.

I've heard worse, frankly...

[davidstone28]

They implement traffic shaping and bandwith throttling for P2P applications but don't seem willing to provide details of precisely how severe this is.

For an 18month contract, it seems a bit of a risk for even medium load P2Per (say 20gb pcm) to sign up to.

[nichomach]

True, but most users aren't P2P users; if you want that, you buy from another provider. Personally, I can see this being very, very good value for the average punter who wants to surf, send and receive email, maybe do some work stuff from home and *gasp* buy the odd few tracks (or even albums) as downloads.

[Bob Crabtree]

I've written a detailed - but easy to read and not overly long - news story.

The outstanding question, it would seem, is what the company means when it says it will "restrict high bandwidth activity in peak hours to allow the majority of customers to use their broadband connection for normal residential usage".

I'm presuming that it means that the download speeds available during peak hours - defined, rather perversely, as 8am to midnight - are going to be considerably less than the headline figure of 8Mbps.

Bob