E-minister calls for slower broadband

Newish e-minister Douglas Alexander has called for BT to introduce slower, cheaper forms of ADSL to entice customers to take up the service.

He said in a statement: "The challenge for BT is to introduce lower-priced, lower-specification products of the sort which have helped consumers move up the broadband ladder in other countries."

A DTI spokesman was unable to confirm exactly which countries the e-minister had in mind, but he did confirm the comments related to consumer broadband.

This could mean one of two things - either launching services with a bandwidth lower than the minimum 512Kpbs available today, or increasing the numbers of customers sharing to each line out of the exchange - the so-called "contention ratio".

The higher the contention ratio, the more users are competing for a given amount of bandwidth from the local exchange to the internet.

Current contention ratios on BTopenworld's service are 50:1, though DSL services were launched in the USA with contention rates of 100:1 and 150:1, which left consumers fuming about the poor service levels they received.

While BT has been criticised for slow and expensive installations, their customer satisfaction numbers are at least quite impressive - 85 per cent of DSL users say they wouldn't stop £40 per month DSL to go back to dial-up, even if it was free.

The statements came in a press release to accompany a report from the Broadband Stakeholder Group, proposing a number of ways to speed the take-up of broadband services.