BellSouth chooses pricing simplicity

BellSouth is bucking the “buy it cheaper here” syndrome currently running rampant through the broadband community, announcing today that it is eliminating three- and six-month introductory pricing for its residential DSL service and going instead to a simplified pricing plan that puts basic DSL at $32.95 a month.

The company has eliminated activation fees and shipping charges for CPE and is lowering the price of the DSL modem and a gateway product, as well as eliminating the requirement that customers buy a voice services package to get the $32.95 price.

“We are listening to our customers, and they have asked for a straightforward pricing plan with no gimmicks,” said a BellSouth spokesman.

Consumers can still get $10 discounts off DirecTV service and varying discounts off Cingular Wireless packages by subscribing to BellSouth’s unlimited long-distance and Complete Choice package, which includes advanced calling features such as Caller ID, call-waiting and call-forwarding.

But the new simplified pricing for DSL allows them to buy FastAccess DSL Lite, at 256 kb/s downstream and 128 kb/s upstream, for $24.95 a month. The basic DSL of 1.5 Mb/s downstream and up to 256 kb/s upstream is $32.95, and the premium product of 3 Mb/s downstream and up to 384 kb/s upstream is $42.95 a month.

Those prices are still highly competitive with most cable modem offerings, the spokesman said.

“Our competition is with cable,” he commented. “A lot of people ask us about Verizon and SBC, but we don’t compete with them, so we don’t really care what they are doing.”

BellSouth may still do market-specific discounts, in response to competition, the spokesman said.

“This is a very competitive market, and if in New Orleans, Cox does something, we want to be able to react,” he said. “But our goal is to simplify and limit our pricing, and that is not going to change in the near future.”

In recent weeks, Verizon, SBC and Qwest have all launched DSL promotions that lower prices to $14.95 for new customers.

“We have never intended to be the low-priced option,” the spokesman said. “We want to be the provider you depend on.”

While business press has been touting a broadband price war in recent weeks, most of the lower prices are for new customers only and are introductory. In some cases, as in Comcast’s speed boosts for its cable modem service to 6 Mb/s, prices don’t go down and may even go up.