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BT Wholesale introduced a promotional offer earlier this year that halved the £50 fee the company charges to activate an ADSL connection. It comes to an end on 31 March and although BT has not returned requests for comment, Tiscali tells us that the charge is to be re-instated.

Tiscali's ISP Director Steve Horley said that BT's move is 'not very helpful to the take-up of broadband.'

'I'm a little surprised,' he said. 'In the past, these promotions have been the forerunner to more permanent arrangements.'

He said that Tiscali's own calculations put a reasonable activation fee at around £5. 'There's absolutely no justification for this level of fee,' he said. 'Not even if they dropped it to £20.'

Tiscali has not made any specific announcements about how the reintroduction

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of the full price activation fee will affect its prices. It began waiving the fee (on the 512Kbits/sec product) before Christmas which was prior to BT's promotion, and currently couple this with a free modem, but we were told that Tiscali would be changing around deals on a regular basis.

Freeserve has said it will continue to swallow the activation fee. A spokesperson told us: 'We have no plans to change our pricing plan structure. Freeserve customers can rest assured that we have no plans to reinstate the activation fee.' (Freeserve does charge for its modem).

AOL says it is not driven by BT's pricing, but creates special offers of its own and this week announced it is dropping the £95 set-up fee it charges for an ADSL account - essentially an £85 modem (BT Voyager USB) and £10 postage and packing - to current dial-up customers. It does not specifically charge customers BT Wholsale's activation fee. A spokesperson for AOL told us that the company is also looking at 'other options' for non-members.

BT Wholesale wants to hold on to this money-spinning activation fee as long as possible. ISPs have protested for some time about the amount of this charge and in conversations today have said that deals that do away with the set up costs have been a great drive in broadband uptake.

BT had not returned our requests for comment by the time of publishing.