Tesco Offers Unlimited Broadband for £2.50 (Kind Of)
Line rental not included in pricing but mandatory if you want the deal.
Tesco, purveyor of all things, er, everything, has launched a new unlimited broadband package that's priced at just £2.50 per month.
Now, before you go calling your current ISP to tell them you're moving to Tesco's uber cheap plan, there is a 'but' here. The catch is line rental, which costs £13.75 per month and brings the total price to £16.25 per month. You'll also have to sign a 12-month contract if you want to avoid the £40 set-up fee (if not, you can get onto a month-to-month rolling contract). If you can somehow find it within yourself to see past all of that, this deal will also nab you free evening and weekend landline calls for your troubles, and Tesco ClubCard owners will get triple points.
Of course, despite the 'unlimited' part of this package, you're not completely free to download like there's no tomorrow. That said, the fair use policy is pretty generous: According to Tesco, you can expect them to call upon their 'fair use' policy if you regularly exceed 100GB of downloads per month. Tesco will then ask you to modify your usage. If you continue at that pace for two more consecutive months, you'll have your service cut off or suspended. There's also throttling in place at peak times of the day and night. High-demand, non-essential services (such as P2P services) may be slowed down during these high-activity periods to ensure there's enough bandwidth to go around. Tesco's Fair Usage and Traffic Management Policy defines off-peak hours as anytime from midnight to 6pm.
Tesco isn't the only one offering cheap-as-chips broadband these days. This Is Money's Tara Evans points to O2's All Rounder package with evening and weekend calls added in, which offers unlimited downloads with no fair usage policy for £16.25 a month, the same price as Tesco. ZDNet points to to TalkTalk's similarly priced plan that sees customers charged £17.05 per month for the first 12 months.
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Hi
Did whomever wrote the above feel justified in that silly headline...its totally untrue as explained in the paragraphs following it...
How about a more honest headline...
"Tesco try and rip off users using false advertising"
Ofcom has already warned ISP`s about this sort of advertising.....
All the best Brett
I can see the headline as justified. It plays on the way Tesco advertise the deal, but shows that the price isn't necessarily the full cost.
I love Tesco as a retail store for my shopping both in person and for home deliveries but they do seem to be spreading themselves very qucikly when it comes to entering venturing into other markets.
In the last year or two we've seen Tesco insurance (car, home then pet), Tesco banking etc. the list goes on. They've already had one major online banking fubar which stopped anyone accessing their finances for a couple of days and so I hope they don't screw up people internet access too.
Hang on, isn't line rental essential anyway? All they're doing is saying that it has to be paid to them (and possibly tacking a little extra on). The real issue is the use of "unlimited" when it has a 100GB per month fair usage cap.
Our unlimited broadband with Sky is £7.50 per month (which they claim is unlimited), but we've got to pay line rental to BT, Sky or someone else at about £12.50 per month. A few years ago the broadband packages were up at £12.50+ per month, plus the line rental.
It really is about time that OFCOM get some balls and make unlimited really unlimited.
wikipedia states that unlimited is:
An unlimited or infinite quantity.
Why is it that ISP still fail to understand the basic definition.
At no point of any of the terms and service can 'unlimited' be used as each aspect is limited by something.
100GB download LIMIT per month.
Bandwidth LIMIT at peak times.
And its Speed LIMITED as well. (hardware limitation's (exchange, cabling, switching ect) this seem to be the only part which could be seen as a reasonable limit) But even then LIMITING the speed to 10Mb is still a con as many countries have 1000Gb networks running.
Virgin's 'unlimited' in that the amount you can download is traffic managed but won't render your connection useless like BT's system does. Virgin reduce your speed by a certain amount if you exceed a very reasonable download quota (related to your speed\package) during well-defined day-time periods. If like me you download at night by just leaving a download manager to do it's thing into the small hours it is ideal. They also don't get too crappy with you if you occasionally exceed the quota like BT (no warning letters unless you continue to max-out your connection 24\7 - which by anyone's reasonable standard of use would be taking the p*ss a bit to do on a consumer line, 'fair usage for all' and all that)
They've already had one major online banking fubar which stopped anyone accessing their finances for a couple of days and so I hope they don't screw up people internet access too.http://www.bosin.info/g.gif
Hi
SPAMMER ..REPORTED...
All the best Brett