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Although the company is in the middle of a major recapitalsation scheme, NTL says that over the next eight months it will expand its broadband Internet service to 25,000 homes in the Dublin area.
Currently the company is running the service on a trial basis where it is available to 1,500 homes. NTL says that 11 percent of these broadband-enabled houses have taken up the service, a rate deemed to be "very good."
What may be most significant however is the price that NTL is planning to charge for the high-speed service. At EUR35 per month, NTL's cable broadband offering will cost consumers around a third of the price Eircom has proposed for its high-speed ADSL service, i-stream.
Both i-stream and NTL's cable broadband service offer connection speeds to the Internet of 512kbit/s, and NTL is also rolling a slower service that will connect to Net at 128kbit/s at a cost of EUR25 per month. Furthermore, with both of NTL's services users can receive a discount of EUR5 per month if they also subscribe to the company's digital television service.
If NTL's expanded offering proves a success, the company will consider introducing it in other parts of Ireland, a spokesperson for NTL told ElectricNews.Net.
The launch of a broadband service from NTL could spell bad news for Eircom. Eircom's high-speed Internet service has been held up for months due to a regulatory dispute with the ODTR over what price Eircom wants to charge other operators for wholesale access.
With no consumer broadband product available from Eircom, would-be users are now looking for high-speed Net access through any means available. This desperation is sure to be a boon to companies like NTL who can offer the service to small businesses and consumers with virtually no competition.
And NTL is not alone; other companies are also getting in on the action, with firms such as Esat and European Access Providers looking to roll out different kinds of geographically limited broadband services in Ireland in the coming weeks.
The spokesperson for NTL Ireland told ElectricNews.Net that expansion of digital television in Ireland remains its primary commitment and that coverage for the service has been expanded to 180,000 homes, up 40,000 from the end of last year. Furthermore, the spokesperson said that the company said it is testing VOIP (voice over IP) telephony solutions for deployment from next year.
All of this comes after almost two years of anticipation on the part of Irish consumers. It was in 2000 that NTL first said it wanted to launch an integrated broadband Internet/digital television/voice telephony service, but hang-ups and delays over the past 24 months have put any such launch well behind the expectations of Irish consumers.
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