2006 in review: The year of the free broadband

2006 was the year of the ‘free’ broadband package.

Carphone Warehouse started the phenomenon, offering thousands of enthusiastic customers 8Mbits/sec broadband, albeit with a 40GB per month usage cap. 

But you had to sign up to the company’s TalkTalk telephone bundle, so customers were charged a £30 connection fee and then £21 a month. Carphone Warehouse chief executive Charles Dunstone freely admitted the deal is a loss leader, on which he expects to lose at first to gain customers.

But that didn’t stop others rushing in, as company’s like Orange and Sky later offering similar packages.

And to go with that broadband, we saw rise adoption of the wireless networks in the home.

A growing alternative to wi-fi though was the Homeplug. These allow users to set up home networks without the need for wireless and speeds can be more reliable than wi-fi. By the back end of the year, devices were out offering a claimed 200Mbits/second, although like wireless networks, you’ll never reach those speeds.

Although the dot com boom and bust is over, we saw a mass scramble for .eu domains in early 2006,as UK firms rushed to ensure their brands were registered with the suffice.

The .eu registry, Eurid, received 390,000 applications within 100 minutes of the suffice being made available. EU commissioner Viviane Reding said: "Europe and its citizens can now project their own web identity, protected by EU rules… making .eu a powerful domain name on equal footing with .com."

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