Thursday 03/05/01

Some good news on broadband! Blueyonder, Telewest's 512k cable modem service, just got cheaper. It was £33 a month, now -- if you already subscribe to another Telewest service -- it's down to £25. Which, at around a tenner more than the normal unmetered dial-up monthly wedge, is much more like it.

I've been using Blueyonder from my charming hovel since February, and it works a treat. Well, up to a point: it feels slower than my my pal's 512k DSL service up the road, and until recently the news servers seemed to think no news was good news far too often. But that's fixed now, as have been various other temporary outages and misconfigurations.

The most impressive thing hasn't been the technical fixing, but that Telewest continues to make all the right noises about Blueyonder customer service. It's not perfect, but it tries -- questions do get answered, problems do get sorted out, and you can expect to have your issues taken seriously. If only all the users behaved like that, though: news of the price cut was greeted by some as a rip-off. You see, they didn't have any other services from Telewest and didn't qualify for the new tariff. And hell hath no fury like a subscriber who suspects that someone, somewhere's getting a better deal.

When I used to work on PC Magazine, subscribers could get the title for well under half the newstand price, but only got some of the covermount CDs. Somehow, the connection between these two facts never quite filtered through to certain of our more ardent correspondents, who will probably go to their graves convinced they're the victim of evil conspiracy to deny them their software. "But it's free to them. Why can't I have it?". Readers, eh? We love you really.