Telewest: Caps "confuse consumers"

Cable operator Telewest said today that capped broadband services from rivals BT and Wanadoo "confuse consumers."

The company's response to a recent smattering of low-cast broadband service launches takes the approach that the lower costs are only achievable by "imposing harsh usage caps on customers," in the words of a press release sent out today.

Telewest's own lower-cost, 256kbps downstream basic broadband service has a "usage guideline" of 750MB per day. This however is not a cap - rather, it serves as an advisory to try to upsell heavy net users a higher speed service.

"Hype over lower pricing and faster speeds is being used as a fig leaf to hide inadequate services with heavy restrictions," said Telewest president and CEO Eric Tveter. "A low-cost 1Mb service with a 1Gb or 2Gb monthly cap defeats the whole point of faster broadband.

"We have been offering faster speeds for the past three years, including the UK's first residential 3Mb service. We also recently increased the speed of our blueyonder broadband services by 50%, at no extra cost and with no usage restrictions, which represents genuine value.

"Despite the best efforts of the bigger ADSL providers, consumers are still voting with their feet and exclusively promoting heavily capped services won't help their cause."