BT has a tight grip on the broadband market

[hazephase]

How tight is it ? 3.8 million broadband users form BT and another 11.2m UK households - more than half the country - received broadband access over a BT phone line .
Can we say that they control the broadband market ?

[JenniP]

If you have ADSL, then you are pretty much using a BT line at some point (Unless you live in Hull of course).

Even if your using a supplier on a LLU line the bit of copper running between your house and the exchange is still BT, most ISPs use either IpStream or DataStream to acutally get the data from the exchange to the internet and that again is run by BT.

So pretty much unless you get your Broadband by a cable provider you have some part of it provided by BT.

You will find that in some part the price you pay is directly affected by the price that BT charges the ISP to provide the service whether that is for IPStream/DataStream or to rent space in their exchange.

Its partly due to this that the BT Openworld service is so popular, when I got the phone line for my new house I was offered BT Broadband at a discounted rate, its very easy to just say yes. The want of having one supplier for everything is why multi-play's are so effective which is why so many suppliers are trying to sell you everything (IE Sky - TV, Phone, Internet, Orange - Mobile, Landline, Internet etc).

Jen