O2 Jumps Into UK Broadband Market

The UK broadband market is becoming more and more interesting as everyone and his brother seeks a piece of it.

 

Now it’s mobile operator O2 that’s jumping on the bandwagon. They’re launching a service this month, just in time to find dissatisfied customers who signed up with other newbies TalkTalk or Orange who are now coming out of contract – and from surveys about customer satisfaction regarding those two, the time might be propitious.

 

Certainly it’s starting on a modest level, with the aim of having only a million customers by 2010. And the pricing is quite fair, at $15 a month for service for those who are currently O2 mobile customers, with no monthly usage limit, and free, 24-hours, UK-based tech support. That last part could be a major factor, since many UK broadband services charge for tech support, which is all too often outsourced to India.

 

Unlike other services, however, O2 has no plans to offer landline service or Internet TV, but will focus instead on the broadband market.

 

It had been expected that O2 would enter the market before this, since it purchased Be Broadband last year for $100 million. But as that network only covered urban areas, O2 had to weight further investment to cover more of the population. In the end, though, it’s shied away from that, meaning the new service will only reach about 50% of the population.