 |  | By Neil Hawkins Staff Writer Friday, 11 January 2008 |
OUR weekly round-up of UK broadband news and developments in the UK broadband market.
Cheapest broadband ever! Well, until 31st January.
COMPARING the recent plethora of New Year broadband offers its clear Virgin Media have thrown down the (broadband?!) gauntlet with a remarkable £4.50 per month contract for their Broadband Size M package.
All you have to do is sign up to their Size M phone package which at £11 per month is as cheap as BT’s lowest cost line rental. It also includes unlimited weekend calls to the UK. This means that for £15.50 a month you can get 2Mb broadband with unlimited downloads and a phone line with unlimited weekend calls.
The other bonus of Virgin Media's broadband offer is that you will be moving over to Virgin Media’s fibre network which means you’ll get the advertised speed. So, find out whether you live in a Virgin cabled area on our Virgin Media broadband comparison page and soon you could be receiving super cheap broadband!
The offer ends 31st January, find out more here!
(All you non-cablers out there can take advantage of Virgin Media’s £9.99 per month Bundle Three. Unlimited Broadband 1Mb with Unlimited Evening and Weekend phone calls included, marvellous.)
AOL Free Laptop (or PS3) Update!
AOL Broadband’s 'Free Laptop' offer has received a bit of a revamp. The three laptop configurations available as part of the offer have been turned into options 1, 2 and 3. They correspond to the differing laptop specifications available.
You can choose the standard model (no.1) or upgrade the hard drive (2) or processor (3).
Of course if you have a laptop already or would find a PlayStation 3 more useful then why not get one of those for absolutely nothing instead! AOL is still running their free PS3 offer and has consoles in stock but when they’re gone, they’re gone!
Check out our review of the AOL Broadband Wireless Plus packages for more info!
Tiscali to add mobile service and turn quad-play
TISCALI is planning to rebrand Toucan mobile in order to compete with Virgin Media as a quad-play provider.
Quad-play means that you can get Broadband, TV, Phone and Mobile all from the same supplier for one price every month, usually at some sort of discount.
The Toucan mobile service, acquired during Tiscali’s takeover of Pipex, currently runs on the T-Mobile network, but according to the Telegraph, Tiscali is currently in negotiations with other networks so this may change.
The service is also likely to be SIM-only, meaning customers will have to provide their own handsets.
It will be interesting to see how Tiscali performs with this added service and whether it will be popular, particularly as another element of their package, Tiscali Internet TV, has seen a recent fall in subscriber numbers.
And Finally Spam, spam, and more spam
Tired of slow speeds? Convinced that your provider is throttling your connection? Well, it might just be that your broadband traffic is stuck in a spam-jam (yes, I did just make that up).
SoftScan’s latest figures show that during 2008 so far, of all email scanned a whopping 97% is classed as Spam.
Phishing emails – those that pretend to be from your bank but really only want to pilfer your account details and steal all your money – come out on top. Imagine how fast the internet could be if only someone would give it a spring clean.
Any volunteers for this task should reply with names (and bank details) on a postcard please...
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