Is ADSL Affordable now?

In the light of BT's decision to reduce the wholesale cost of ADSL to ISPs, David Dorn examines the financial implications for home users

The first thing that must be said about ADSL is that it is A Good Thing - it has many plus points, and only one or two gotchas.

To begin with, it's 'always on', it's fast (and how) and my experience of it is that it's just about 100% reliable. The speed of an ADSL connection - again, in my experience - is such that, the first time you use it, you'll be wowed by it, and after a week or so, you'll find it almost unbearable to use a normal V90 modem. You'll find 30 Megabyte downloads happening in six or seven minutes, huge Web pages loading almost immediately and speed optimised Web sites just being there - it's really that quick.

Because it's always on, too, you'll find yourself referencing things on the Web and here on AOL (and more specifically, here on PPC, we hope) as a matter of course - it becomes second nature.

The gotchas? There's really only one - the need to have a good personal firewall on your system. But then again, as we've been at pains to point out here, everyone should have a personal firewall on their system, and use it.

Money

Now that BT has dropped the wholesale price of an ADSL line to under £15, then, we can reasonably expect the ISPs it supplies to pass the £10 or so saving onto us, the consumers. That would mean that, for instance, an ADSL subscription that previously cost, say, £49.99 a month, would now cost £39.99 a month. That might seem like a lot of money - but I've been doing some sums, and even at that price, it's cheap in comparison to 0845 dialup providers - as I'll show you.

If you were to dial up and stay connected 24/7, the base cost at published BT rates (not taking into account any discounts or special deals) would cost around £196 a week - that's £852 per calendar month or £2,558 per quarter.

If you didn't connect at all during peak times (8am-6pm), the costs would drop to a more reasonable £70 or so per week, or £306 per calendar month - £920 per quarter. Bear in mind that that only pays for the phone calls - it doesn't include any subscription to any ISP.

Taking it even further, if you half the amount of time you spend online to seven hours per evening, off-peak, you're still looking at £35 a week, or £150 a month (and if you think that's a lot, trust me, there are plenty of folks spending many more hours per day online).

Take it one stage further, and go to three and a half hours per evening, and the monthly cost is still £75 - or £215 a quarter. For modem speeds?

Hold on - even at pre-price decrease rates, an AOL ADSL package will cost £49.99 a month - that's £150 a quarter - fully £65 per quarter cheaper than an 0845 dialup connection. Assuming that AOL follows the general trend and drops its pricing by a tenner a month, it'll be £95 a quarter cheaper - and you get your AOL subscription included with that (which is worth £45 a quarter, give or take).

In that scenario, you'd be paying £25 a month, effectively, for ten times the speed, 24/7 always on, no waiting reliable connection.

To me, it's a no-brainer. It has to be worth it. As I say, once you've tasted the speed and convenience of an ADSL connection, you'll never want to return to a modem. In fact, there a re people I know personally who recently moved house, and turned more than one down specifically because it was outside the ADSL coverage area - and, truth be told, if I was moving house, the new one would have to be capable of getting an ADSL connection.

Evangelist?

Does that make me some kind of evangelist? No - I don't think so. Over the years, I've played with every flavour of modem and connection, from 300 baud acoustic couplers right through to fat pipes and just about everything in between. I've come to hold the view that it's the speed of our connections that holds everything up when it comes to the Internet moving on. If an ADSL connection becomes the norm, then you'll see richer Web sites, more informative services, and your knowledge base will grow as a result. Now, that's got to be good news for our kids!

So, to answer the question posed in the title of this piece... YES! Go get it!

 

David Dorn