Wanadoo Broadband – No more BT lines
Wanadoo broadband always wanted to be listed amongst top 10 broadband service providers. Being one of the first ISPs which used to provide transitional dial-up service, Wanadoo was the first ISP which was given the license to provide up to 2 Mbps broadband connection during that at a price of £15 per month. Wanadoo has evolved a lot better and recently they have conducted trail test of their new broadband connection which does not run on BT phone lines at all. They are using an advantage of the Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) wholesale arm of BT which does not need BT lines in picture. Wanadoo was first launched in year 2001 in the UK because a French based company took over the most popular Freeserve Service during that time. During the time of 56 kbps connection, Freeserve was introduced by the Dixon Group, which was the cheapest ISP then.
If Wanadoo major investment in the LLU becomes popular, BT is going to loose a major share of customers as LLU can act an as alternative to BT expensive ADSL service. Wanadoo plans on offering cheap broadband connection at way lower prices. Cost of such a LLU implementation has come down significantly during these years and many other ISPs are also looking at this valuable alternative than depending on BT infrastructure. The major advantage of the LLU service is the faster and cheaper internet connection. Other small ISPs are all said to be working on the LLU technique but seems like Wanadoo is going to be the one getting this service to the mass population and it is believed to be the biggest success stories of all time as predicted by several analysts. The features offered along with the Wanadoo service are Voice over IP and Video on Demand which are absolutely irresistible.
BT has always regarded Wanadoo as its biggest competitor as Wanadoo has worked extremely hard in upgrading their infrastructural backbone and started offering exceptional quality service packages like the 1 Mbps package was upgraded to 2 Mbps. This step was taken to attract more customers and so facilitate the existing customer by offering double power at an additional cost. But then Wanadoo had planned this in advanced and had placed a bandwidth cap on their offerings which does not allow anybody to go beyond 1 GB limit per month. Now with Wanadoo’s double offer scheme, this cap has been raised to 2 GB. Until now, Wanadoo is said to have more than 0.7 million users connected to its broadband network and is expected to grow to an extent of having 1.7 million broadband users by year end 2008, which is almost similar to what BT has to date.
Apart from their Pay as you Go, dial-up offer, Wanadoo offers a Premium package of 2 Mbps broadband connection with a maximum of 30GB download per month. The fastest a broadband ISP has offered today is 8mbps unlimited broadband connection. But now things are changing for the betterment of the home and business users. The biggest advantage of Wanadoo broadband is their no connection fees policy and a free modem with bonus 6 months free local calls on your existing phone line. This is a far better offer than many others.
The only issue with Wanadoo is their bad customer support which they need to work on very hard to live up to the expectations they have raised recently. Wanadoo is one amongst many others who have been keeping a watch over those subscribers which are going beyond the usage limit and on others as well to accommodate more users in that region.
The future of Wanadoo is going to be bright, only if they work hard to overcome there weaknesses. Just last month, the French owner company which also owns the Orange mobile phone service made things a lot clearer that they are going to leave this name Wanadoo for another one which is going to be Monkier, Orange. This decision was taken due to Wanadoo poor name reputation and the requirement of re-branding the service. What better is would be to use an already existing internationally trusted brand name which can open more feasible marketing opportunities. Thus, the decision looks concrete as the exsiting Wanadoo users are going to get a new email address.
The point to note over here is that when Freeserve was renamed, it coasted the French company around £20 million several years ago where they thought Wanadoo is high power, potential, passionate name. It’s estimated that this time if Wanadoo is renamed, it’s going to cost a fortune of money to the company which will be around £135 million only in the first year. Even though, the French company thinks they can recover this amount by end year.
