TalkTalk cuts price of free broadband

Carphone Warehouse’s local-loop unbundling telco, TalkTalk, has announced that it’s cutting the price of its “free” DSL service. This concept may push the boundaries of logic, but let’s recap: last year, TalkTalk announced it was offering DSL service at no extra cost if you signed up for its PSTN offering.

Despite the fact that this isn’t “free”, it was heavily publicised and led to a wave of other not-free free broadband offers. Carphone was a victim of success, struggling to keep up with the demand; its plans were based on figures for the cost of serving customers using its own DSLAMs under local-loop unbundling, but it found it hard to deploy its gear into BT local exchanges fast enough.

That forced the firmto resell BT’s IPStream wholesale DSL service, at rates which lost itmoney. This doesn’t seem to have put CEO Dunstone and the rest of the company off, though. Prices are coming down. Originally, customers had to pay £10.50 a month for line rental, which is staying, plus a further tenner’s worth of phone calls. This element has been cut to £5.89 a month, so long as you sign up for 18 months and cough up a “connection charge” of £29.99.

It’s cheap, but it still isn’t “free”.