Fast4 offers £9.98 ADSL2+ product

Fast4 has launched a mixture of ADSL2+ products varying in price from £9.98 to £24.95. These are based upon the wholesale ASDL2+ service from Murphx which is thought to be obtainable on some 800 of the larger exchanges out of a possible 5500 in the UK.

The entry level product includes a 1GB usage allowance and additional usage costs £1-£2 per GB depending on how much extra is purchased. A tad worrying however is the difficulty in establishing the cost for going over the data usage allowances, which Mark at ISPreview.co.uk has encountered. The further products carry a 15GB and 30GB data allowance, prior to signing up it is vital that people verify with any service provider whether an allowance only counts the downstream traffic or is the summation of upstream and downstream traffic.

The remark “Obviously the speeds are very dependant on the quality of the customer’s telephone line and the distance they are from their local exchange but everyone should see a massive lift on their current service speeds” as referenced in the ISPreview needs to be qualified, as ADSL2+ on lines that just manage 0.5Mbps to 1Mbps with an up to 8Mbps ADSL product may barely see a marginal enhancement, for those with ADSL speeds in excess of 3Mbps the improvements will be much superior.