Avanti Satellite Service Priced

Most of the time announcing prices to the public generally involves a fair amount of marketing and, if the prices are pretty good value compared to the rest of the market, normally quite a bit of company generated fan fair and media noise, too. However, CEO of Avanti Communications David Williams has slipped under the radar a little when announcing the price of Avanti?s new Satellite services for UK consumers.

The service has been preparing to launch over the last few years and the HYLAS1 satellite is just about ready to supply broadband speeds to the entire country. Williams announced the prices after this week?s emergency budget stating that Avanti will be able to reach the entire country at a speed of 8 Mbps and will be priced at around ?25 a month.

Avanti had previously hinted at prices as low as ?15 in the past, but despite this ?25 is still a very favourable deal when considering that the only real competitor of Avanti, Eutelsat, is currently charging as much as ?35 a month for a service that only provides 3.6 Mbps.

Williams also stated:

?Avanti has said on many occasions that the market will deliver universal broadband service at 2Mbps. Avanti can supply 8Mbps to anyone in the UK for ?25 per month later this year when the HYLAS 1 satellite launches. The approximate ?200m which may be spent (from the BBC license fee) may help some rural users to buy satellite services faster, but it will not have an impact on any Telco?s ability to build fibre, which the government estimated in the Digital Britain report may cost ?30bn.?

Of course, satellite broadband is not the answer to all of the countries broadband problems. The speed might be fast and in a rural area it might make a big difference, but usage allowances have typically been incredibly low ? no better or in some cases worse than most mobile broadband packages designed for light use.

There?s also a huge latency on getting the data into orbit and back which makes things like gaming just about impossible and even more typical services like VOIP somewhat less reliable than their traditional broadband counterparts. For more rural parts of the country still without practical access to a broadband landline however, it?s just about the only option they have.

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