An alternative - Entanet (and all our various partner/resellers)

[boggits]

Hi all,

Thx to Alan for pointing me in this direction.

I am about to revisit the case for taking wholesale from KC (making it 4 times) and I need to get an idea for the potential numbers AND what sort of price you'd be willing to pay for the service.

Please let me know (through whatever medium you want) your opinions

Thx

J
COO Entanet International

[tef89]

For an upto 8mb service (my line easily achieves 850KB when un-shaped) that had realistic traffic shaping controls (i.e not from 3pm to 3am and all day during weekend and holidays ) unlike Karoo where usenet etc is restricted to 15-30KBps, I would be happy to pay in the region of £20/25 a month for an unlimited 'off-peak' service.  Also I'd want either a monthly contract or short-term 3-6 month option.

I'd be happy to avoid true peak for any heavy use (say 4pm to 10pm as Virgin do) I think most heavy users are realistic and know bandwidth is limited, especially at peak times but Karoo's shaping is unrealistic and over the top.

[stormy]

Welcome J,

Hopefully, something along the lines of what you provide in "BT land" with high off-peak allowances, and fair peak allowances.

Again £20-25 in line with your current reseller tariffs.

Hopefully you would be able to offer us a service similar to your BT offerings. Which by all accounts maintains decent speeds through the day unlike Karoo which is pretty much crippled after 6pm.

Ideally if you want to make a go of it, some advertisement in the local HDM (Hull Daily Mail) which might not even cost you much if you are announcing a competing service to Karoo because that would be very big news locally. They have been running various negative articles about KCOM and specifically the retail broadband arm Karoo.

You would I think be able to get good penetration of the existing 80,000+ market if you pitch it right.

I would probably offer a range of services like you do in the BT areas to give low bandwidth users a reason to ditch Karoo. If you aim it just at people who want to download (which to be fair are the majority on this site) you might not get as good a reception from the casual Karoo users who are looking for something new and unique.

Cheers,

Mike

[Terrac]

I currently pay £25 for the old 1.5meg service..  Never "up"graded to the 8mb Karoo system after hearing about the problems. 

I'd go with the others..  £20-£25 for a good service similar to what you provide in BT land and i'd be very happy.    as said you'd get a lot of free advertising in the local paper and a lot of interested parties from that due to the fact you were actually offering an alternative.

[miken]

Hey James,

I would be looking to pay around the £30-£40 mark (preferably an 'office' service with the higher upload speed)
Aslong as you can provide the same superiour service as in BT land with high off-peak usage and maintain exceptable speeds throughout the day I'd jump ship as soon as its available.

Thank you!

Mike

[Fastethernet]

Hi J,

Welcome to the forum.

I would be willing to pay up to £35 per month for a more lenient shaped traffic service during peak hours and an unshaped service during off-peak with best efforts as far as exchange link speeds.

Numbers, there were over 3,000 KCOM customers who took the time to sign the petition to 10 Downing Street, many more would support any other provider. I seem to remember a figure in the region of 80,000 residential subscribers within KCOM's broadband cloud.

Would you have any designs on offering services to local businesses? Hull is crying out for SDSL 

[The Dominator]

At the moment i pay £40 for a 3meg  - unlimited.
There seems to be no throttling on the line but there again i am paying over and above for a 3meg link.
I can get 8mg on my line (less than 1km from the exchange) and i am not a downloader, i just want good bandwidth when i want it..

I feel £40 i a lot of money for a mediocre service and would pay the same but would want 3meg down and also 3meg up .

At the moment my upload speed is capped at 400k but i have never achieved anything like that.

I run a server, for my own use (various House related stuff) and want better upload to allow things like streaming camera etc.. (security etc..)

[BimB]

Hi

I would love you to provide Broadband as close to your re-sellers packages in BT land.

8mb service that is usable at peak times would be worth and extra £5-10 a month.

You will find most people will pay as long as the service is decent.

Lets face it a help line that wasn't mostly engaged would be an improvement!

Lets hope it happens.

BimB

[Adrian]

Anything up to £29.99 for a fair peak and offpeak allowance, with up to 8Mbit speeds, there are a lot of people and businesses who would want an alternative provider as proved by the letters to Ofcom, ISPA and the almost 3000 signature petition on the PM.gov.uk website. Also many students who are at Hull College/Hull University who get ripped off by KC/Landlords due to there been only 12 month contracts available.

Business customers especially as many have often been affected by the lack of resillience and slow speed in which KC fix problems. If the residential service goes down centrally, then 9/10 the business services are too.

[Aardie]

I am on the old 3 meg service and paying £40 pound a month and would pay this as per Dominator's remark's and know of quite a few business users who would jump ship at the drop of an hat and a lot of residential users to boot.

I am quite a distance from my exchange and know with my short foray with KC's so called Max I would at the most get 4 meg but would be happy with that

Best of Luck in your endeavours

Best Regards

[Robo]

As above and now out of contract with Krapoo-- bring it on 

[dylan]

Hi there,

I suppose that these forums are merely representative of a few disgruntled KC customers. If you consider that the city of Hull by itself (not to mention the outlying villages serviced by KC alone) has a population of 243589 people, residing in 104,000 households, that's quite a few potential customers.

KC stories have featured heavily in both the newspaper and regional news programs recently, with the general consensus being that Hull needs a change. If a new provider were to begin offering service in the area, the media would be all over them like a rash. I'd imagine the exposure you'd get would be priceless.

So I think that the market is there, it's a case of the price.

KC are labouring the point that they have reduced the amount they charge for access to their network to a price similar to which BT would charge. If that's the case, then great. Hopefully you should be able to offer a similar service to that which you offer in BT land. If it's not the case then KC are are not being truthful, and we need to know about it so that we can try and get something done (and please get in touch with me via email dylan <at> karooforums <dot> net if you do have problems. There are people who may be able to help).

Personally, when it comes down to figures. I'd be happy to pay a little more than KC charge me at the moment, and I'd be happy to have similar download limits, so long as you didn't throttle the connection and it was reliable. I think that a lot of issue is taken with throttling connections in KC land. Bandwidth limits are understandable but connections should only be throttled down when a user breaks those limits.

Dyls.

[Adrian]

Well KC will be launching their new packages on Wednesday, so we will have to see what the prices and allowances are like

From what I've heard they may well be similar to Plusnet's packages, with PEAK been 8am-midnight and OFFPEAK unmetered usage allowed between midnight -8am.
All with much less traffic shaping than the current MAX packages.

These should pull KC inline with the rest of the metered usage providers out there and may in turn see Karoo improving.

It will be interesting to see if there any feature changes such as more webspace with more features, more email addresses and options, and things such as higher upstream and true static or multiple IP addressing available on the top package.

I have noticed that Enta are expanding their LLU network so I guess Enta would need to look at the exchanges in Hull to see which were the most viable and could possibly deploy LLU on the more popular exchanges while using KC Wholesale to target other customers using KCs equipment in the other exchanges (the normal wholesale route)

[theappleofmyi]

Anything would be better than Karap 

I would be willing to pay up to £30 for a proper 8Mb+ line, preferably quicker! There must a be huge potential for ANY company who provides fair prices, decent speeds and good technology - not too much shaping and no drop outs.

Jon

[Project Novo]

Hello to all you all.

I have a friend who is actively involved in a number of projects to help create a more competitive telecoms market for Hull in terms of broadband services and is currently working on behalf of a  large  ISP.

He has explained that a company has submitted a proposal to Hull City Council in terms of offering a "wholesale" wireless infrastrucure which would allow for multiple providers to offer services over a common wireless infrastructure. As of yet he has not received a response from the council.

The company in question are in talks with Core Projects on Goulton Street about utilising its business WIFI network bandwidth and infrastructure to deliver a very extensive network across Hull and the surrounding areas for both business and residential Internet connectivity.

I would suggest that as many of you write to Core Projects at Goulton Street allowing them (at a profit of course) to allow this ISP to use its network. 

Why has no one ever asked Ofcom about why KC have neve been "forced" like BT were to offer full "wholesale" access charges for all services in Hull as any Telco that uses part of KC's network in Hull to offer services to its own customers has to purchase the service at KC's "retail" rate. 

In my friends opinion Ofcom and KCOM have been in cahoots for a long time and they have experienced this first hand.
 
Project Novo