Urs Koenig (QL) wrote, on 3/Jan/11 13:07 | Jan3:
How did you find out about this in Switzerland - or do you
watch a lot of British TV?
It's quite easy. My quadruple play provider Swisscom offers saved
searches.
One daily search is "Clive Sinclair" and so it was in my inbox this
morning.
Quadruple play? See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruple_play
Since Jan 1st I pay CHF 125 per month for 20'000kbit Internet
Access, 150
Digital TV channels on my TV and any Internet device, free
phonecalls to all
Swisscom customers.
http://www.swisscom.ch/res/kombi-angebote/vivocasa4/index.htm?languageId=en
What are QLers all over the world pay for similar services? Just to
get a
feeling of how expensive Switzerland is...
Don't get me started on this!
In Britain, most simple broadband services seem to be about £15 per
month with varying options, while line rental is usually about £11.00
to £12.00. Call inclusive packages or other options are generally
more. The monthly allowance varies, some ISPs allow a couple of GB
while others are more generous. It can be really hard to compare
services unless you use a comparison website as services (where
available - England has infinitely more choice than Wales and
Scotland) vary so much. There are exceptions, companies which charge
less for basic services etc.
TalkTalk will provide broadband for £7.50 or so a month, but
widespread reports of billing errors (especially if you are an
ex-Tiscali customer - see Computeractive magazine!) and poor service
hinder it, not to mention their heavy handed sales teams (around here
at least) seem to put a lot of people off.
Sky can provide a "free" service if you are also a satellite customer
and in their networked areas, albeit with usage caps. Around here, we
ain't in such an area and would have to pay £15 to £20 a month for
their standard service.
There aren't that many Quadruple play providers offering integrated
Broadband, tv, telephone and mobile services, although Virgin is
rolling those out. No idea of their prices to compare with yours - the
service doesn't exist where I live.
BT is claiming to be rolling out the 20mb/s broadband to about 55% of
the population by sometime in 2011. Needless to say, around here we
were approached by a BT salesperson telling us that the local exchange
had been upgraded. When we went to check on their website it seems to
have been upgraded to 2mb/s and we are not expected to have faster
very soon. The BT service has an interesting facility to allow you to
login using your home password etc at other BT service points
We are with Orange, on one of their package services. Notionally "up
to" 8mb/s (never more than 2Mb/s), in practice it varies from close to
2mb/s in the middle of the night down to about 24kb/s in the busy
period 3-6pm. The use of the "up to" speeds is very contentious here
with regular press articles equating the phrase "up to" to mean "you
will never get close to this" (applies to all ISPs with the possible
exception of Virgin who seem to be campaigning on the issue). The
monthly charge from Orange is £33 per month, including £11.50 line
rental, wireless router, "unlimited usage" (subject to fair use
policy, which is not specified what a fair use cap might be!),
included evening and weekend telephone call, and a "second line"
internet line with free UK landline calls, Orange mobile calls and
free calls to 30 international destinations (restrictions apply).
While the service has been reliable in the sense of very rarely
failing completely, my big bugbear with Orange is my experience of
their overseas call centres for tech support and in particular their
inability to understand my complaints about getting on just under 25%
of the advertised speed AT BEST!
Like I say, don't get me going on this one! I've gone into some detail
to show that Tony's experience in the south east of england is not
exactly representative of what's available in the other regions of the
country.
Dilwyn Jones
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