Broadband services in the UK are starting to follow the lead of the mobile phone industry, long familiar with the concept of “bolt ons”.
The recent launch of TalkTalk Broadband’s “Boosts” have brought the same flexibility to broadband services in the UK. And we think it is only a matter of time before competitors follow suit.
TalkTalk offer six different Boosts which allow customers to customize their broadband and home phone services without signing up to additional long term contracts. The boosts cost £4 per month and allow customers to trade up and down whenever it suits them. The boosts include: a Speed Boost which temporarily ups your broadband speed to an up to 24 Mb/sec service (if available at your address); a Download Boost which temporarily increases your download limit (if you want to do some serious movies downloading for a short period, for example); and a Half Price Calls to Mobiles Boost on the call plan side.
No other UK broadband or home phone providers offer this sort of flexibility and we think it is a neat approach which other would do well to adopt. In busy households, broadband and home phone usage is not consistent through the year, and the service reflects this, allowing people to upgrade whenever it suits them.
The key for TalkTalk’s economics is the “stickiness” of the non-contract boosts. Clearly they would like customers to upgrade and then leave the boost in place for many months. Time will tell as to whether this actually happens, as the scheme has only been in place since late November last year. But as customers tend to pay for their boosts by direct debit, the likelihood of them remaining in place for several months is greatly increased.
So we think it’s a smart move by TalkTalk and a service with real customer appeal and we await the response of the other broadband big guns like Sky, Virgin Media, O2, BT, and Tiscali!