UK: Treasure Island again

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Mark Rogers, CEO of hobby internet business Malarkey, told the FT conference that as with regular retailers, internet vendors referred to the UK as 'Treasure Island' because of the pricing they got away with here.

In the session on 'How Important is Broadband?' Jaewong Lee of Daum, Korea's most important portal said broadband came in at $25 a month for a 10Mbs service. Silvio Scaglia, founder and CEO of Italy's e.biscom explained that the most popular package in their fast growing business was E85 per month for limitless voice calls inside Italy and a 6 Mbs (10 if you're on fibre) broadband service meanwhile NTL charges E50 for a 1Mbs service.
Nonetheless NTL's Bill Goodland, Director of Internet Products, was able to announce NTL's one millionth broadband customer. He also revealed some trends in broadband usage: it doubles the time spent on the net (compared to dial up), 73 per cent of their broadband users use the net every day, 46 per cent send more than 10 emails a week, 54 per cent bank online and 54 per cent have downloaded media content.

He said the challenge was to migrate the remaining eight million dial up customers and NTL believed flexible speeds and download capacity was the way with 'pay as you go' products the way forward.