Taking a bold step, SBC Communications unveiled the most aggressive DSL pricing program yet early last month. SBC lowered the price of its SBC Yahoo! DSL Express service, which offers access speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps, to just $14.95 per month for new customers who order the service online with a one-year contract. That's one third of the price of most cable modem offerings and even cheaper than the dial-up plans of leading ISPs like America Online and EarthLink.
The promise of saving as much as $30 a month may entice plenty of cable modem subscribers to switch to SBC's DSL product. And with broadband cheaper than narrowband, dial-up customers may readily make the leap too. MSOs may gripe that SBC's pricing tactics are sheer insanity. But the Bell's moves are completely rational. Stealing customers from cable with DSL discounts is far cheaper than building new fiber networks, and it helps SBC retain phone subscribers in the face of cable's aggressive VoIP rollout.
Also on the DSL front, BellSouth Corp. intends to launch a premium service this fall that will deliver data download speeds of up to 6 Mbps. Pricing plans weren't disclosed. Known as FastAccess DSL Xtreme 6.0, the new service will be twice as fast as BellSouth's current top-line DSL product, called FastAccess DSL Xtreme. Once the new tier launches, BellSouth will feature four different levels of DSL service, with downstream speeds ranging from 256 kbps to 6 Mbps.
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