Plusnet in cut-price broadband bundle

Plusnet has unveiled the details of a new bundled phone and broadband product that attempts to match the cut-price offer recently announced by the Carphone Warehouse.

From 4 July, all Plusnet customers will be able to bundle their existing broadband package with a voice line rental and calls offer for £11 per month.

The ISP is also launching a new discount entry-level broadband service for just £9.99 a month from the end of May.

It means that from July, subscribers to Plusnet's new entry level broadband (£9.99 a month) and phone service (£11 a month) can get a bundled phone, broadband and line rental package for £20.99 - the same amount Carphone is charging.

But there are big differences. Plusnet's service is available nationwide (people out of reach of Carphone's unbundled exchanges have to pay an extra tenner a month for the service); Plusnet's offer includes 240 minutes of "free" landlines calls (Carphone offers unlimited local and national landline calls and unlimited international landline calls to 28 countries); and Plusnet's broadband usage limit is just 50 meg a month, a fraction of the 40 gig monthly allowance offered by Carpone.

The other major difference is scale. Carphone's telco TalkTalk has around 2.5m customers and its ambition is to rival BT as the household name for telecoms, while Plusnet is more of a niche operator.

"PlusNet believes it is ideally positioned to deliver convergent communications services to its target customers, who are more experienced internet users," the Sheffield based operator said today.

Details of Plusnet's offer come as the ISP revealed that turnover in the first three months of the year (Q1) was up 37 per cent to £11.2m with the number of broadband punters up at 192,000. ®