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Tariff Benchmarks: DSL January 2004

DSL prices begin to stabilise in 2003

DSL 'entry level' monthly rental prices began to stabilise during 2003, with an average reduction of only 2% during Q4 2003. This comes after an overall 22% fall in 'local currency' terms in the last 3 years.

Point Topic's DSL tariff benchmarks show that out of the 18 operators for which comparative tariff information was collected, only 6 (Bell Canada, SBC, NTT, Yahoo Japan, France Telecom and BT) reduced monthly rental charges in Q4 2003. Another 8 operators maintained their Q3 2003 prices, while the other 4 operators are new to the benchmark list so comparative data had not been collected.

The chart below shows the change in monthly rentals for entry level DSL services, using March 2001 as the base year. Although there have been some sharp swings in individual cases, the overall trend is clear. As the 'Average' lines shows, entry-level DSL prices actually rose to some extent in 2001and then levelled off before falling quite sharply in mid-2003

DSL 'entry level broadband' price index (monthly rentals)

One factor here is the definition of the 'entry-level broadband service' which is used as the reference point to represent DSL cost in each year. Point Topic defines the entry-level as the lowest-cost service offering more than 144kbps downstream. In effect this means that a service has to offer speeds faster than ISDN to be classified as broadband. Operators sometimes change the speed of their lowest-cost services and this accounts for some of the big swings in price shown in the chart.

Some operators, such as Bell Canada and France Telecom, do offer services running at less than 144kbps. Although they do not qualify as broadband, they are important offerings in the market battle to increase broadband penetration and push back competition from cable modems. So we have included these services in the tables below comparing entry-level prices for DSL in different countries.

Asia Pacific remains the cheapest region for DSL (in USD terms) with Taiwan's Chungwa Telecom being the clear leader by offering its 512kbps service at a monthly rental of only $14.80. Yahoo Japan is second, offering a higher speed 8Mbps service for $17.92, with KT (Korea) in fourth place offering 4Mbps for a monthly rental of $24.14, followed by NTT (Japan) offering its 1.5Mbps service for $24.52.

Entry level prices for DSL at USD rates

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