Broadband wars reignite
BT has started the broadside attack on Carphone Warehouse with the launch of a new internet package today – Total Broadband – yes full marks to the marketing guys for thinking that one up. BT is desperate to wrest the advantage back from Carphone warehouse which has attracted over a third of a million customers since the introduction of its ‘free’ broadband offering in April.
Someone at BT has realised that the Carphone warehouse offering locks BT out of the customer for 18 months – a lifetime in the Telco market today. Worse still, the Carphone Warehouse offering locks out landline and potential mobile services as well. Once the customer emerges from the lock in the lay of the land in the Telco market will be very different and BT will have to work very hard to win back customers.
Understandably, Carphone warehouse has been swamped with demand of 340,00 (double its original forecast for take up) and this has lead to call centre melt-down and customers having to wait significantly longer for service than originally anticipated. It sounds to us that this could be following along the lines of C&W’s ill-fated launch of Bulldog six months ago, which is about to close it’s doors to new customers.
BT is constrained from offering a price that undercuts the current rash of offerings by regulatory constraints until next April. So it’s very much trying to sweeten the deal by offering 250 minutes per month of wifi access at BT Hotspots across the UK. BT is also focusing minds on the support element, promoting it’s quality of service, whilst the others scramble to get support centres up to scratch.
It’s still too early to see if all this competition will cause BT much pain, after all it has 5 million customers on broadband, but we can be assured that over the next few months that other companies or consortia will be looking to lock in new customers with offerings before BT is released from it’s monopoly shackles.
With AOL on the block, Bulldog all but dead, things are only just beginning to hot up in the broadband internet, land line, mobile and media space. We predict a blood bath leading up to that point – the ‘land grab’ is on again, let’s hope it isn’t as messy and expensive as the last one in the dot com boom.
Sources