DSL for sale at Bell Atlantic Internet
July 6, 2000
internettelephony.com
ISP slashes 20% from residential service price
BRIAN QUINTON
Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions, a subsidiary of the newly formed Verizon Communications, will reduce the price of its Personal Infospeed DSL product to $39.95 per month, a 20% savings.
The move comes less than two months after Ivan Seidenberg, the CEO of Bell Atlantic--and one of the architects of the merger that combined the biggest RBOC with GTE to form Verizon--described Bell Atlantic’s efforts to spread DSL as “average.”
Bell Atlantic currently offers DSL service in parts of Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, , Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.
Personal Infospeed DSL, the carrier’s prime residential offering, includes Bell Atlantic.net Internet access, and provides access speeds up to 640 kb/s with unlimited use. In additional to the monthly fee, customers pay a start-up charge of $99 that provides them with the necessary DSL modem, six desk and two wall microfilters, a two-line adapter and self-installation software for DSL and Internet access.
Besides this basic residential product, Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions offers consumers two faster, more costly flavors of DSL. Professional Infospeed DSL gives subscribers access at up to 1.6 Mb/s for $99.95 per month, while Power Infospeed DSL provides speeds of up to 7.1 Mb/s for $189.95. Both products also come in enterprise models, with more mailboxes and more Web page space, for about $15 extra per month.
The price cut is expected to accelerate deployment of DSL in Bell Atlantic Internet’s territory--a deployment that the carrier itself said would not meet projections this year.
In April, Bell Atlantic said it would fall short of its goal of 500,000 DSL customers by Dec. 31, perhaps by as much as 100,000 to 200,000 customers. At that time, the carrier said it would use special promotions and value enhancements to light a fire under slower-than-anticipated subcriber adoption of DSL.
At the RBOC’s annual meeting on May 24, Seidenberg said Bell Atlantic had 80,000 DSL customers at the end of the first quarter of 2000, up from 30,000 at the close of 1999.
“We were off to an average start,” he told the audience. “We could do better.” He blamed the early competitive lead taken by cable modems but said he was confident that DSL would pull ahead because “in the long term, it’s a better technology.” Seidenberg became president and co-CEO of Verizon on June 30. |
