Finally Connected to BT Broadband

I finally have internet access from home. I shouldn't say "finally" since it happened pretty fast. From the time we requested it, it took one week to get the line checked out, modem sent to us, and the DSL connection switched on. Not bad.

I put up a little graphic of SBC/Yahoo's DSL price scheme to compare it with what we pay here in London. We had to pay £50 ($80) to BT for our modem; SBC/Yahoo is giving away the modem if you sign up for a year (the minimum contract term here is one year, so there's an $80 difference right there), but we didn't have to pay any cheesey "shipping and handling fee" like SBC/Yahoo subscribers do. Activation was free here, and it's free from SBC/Yahoo.

I think "activation" requires someone to press a button somewhere so it's not a real expense, just another chance for the provider to pad revenues, like charging inflated "shipping and handling" fees.

We pay £28 a month ($45) here which is $10 more (29% higher) than SBC/Yahoo's price. So like almost everything else in England, high-speed internet access costs significantly more than at home. I'll report on comparison cell phone costs in a future entry.

I'm not complaining about 576,000 bps, though. ;-)

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