Demon relaunch targets businesses and geeks

 

Gallery

By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 18 Jun 2010 at 16:33

Demon is back with a new lineup of broadband packages, targeted at businesses and "geeks".

The ISP is looking to attract businesses and power users looking for high-quality support for mission critical apps instead of just opting for residential services because of price.

One of the first ISPs to emerge in the UK, Demon was founded in 1992 and bought by Thus in 1998, which was in turn acquired by Cable & Wireless in 2008. The brand hasn't been heavily marketed since then, but is now bringing the Demon name back to draw power users to the Cable & Wireless network.

We think it's a great time to do it as people are more conscious of not all broadband being equal

"We think it's a great time to do it as people are more conscious of not all broadband being equal," Demon's head Mark Cantwell told PC Pro. "As an industry, it's not got the best reputation."

Cantwell said he doesn't see the classic ISP going toe-to-toe with residential broadband providers, which are battling it out for customers over price.

"It's expert users, geeks, people working from home, gamers and small businesses," he said of Demon's target market. "The 90% of the residential market is just after the cheapest deal for broadband and voice, it's going to be a difficult sell for us. Anyone who knows what an FUP is, what latency is, or who does speed tests - we've got a chance to go after them."

Demon will offer its standard broadband package, starting at £19 a month, as well as a new assured rate, which guarantees a minimum connection level no matter how busy the network is - sort of like an insurance policy, Cantwell said.

"So your Voice over IP will still work, if you're running cloud applications, there's still going to be bandwidth there, no matter what happens to the network," he said. "Someone famous dies, everyone goes on the internet to look, your service is still going to be there for you."

Guaranteeing a 2Mbits/sec connection would cost £100 a month, compared to the hundreds of pounds of month it would cost for a leased line, he claimed.

The Cable acquisition gave Demon access to its better quality business networks - a fact which may be disputed by Demon customers hit by wobbly connections last year - but it also let the firm regroup its customer services staff, said Cantwell.

"A lot of the people who were around in Demon in the 90s were still there, so we've got a lot of people with an average experience of 11 years who are now able to support our business customers, which is great, because they don't follow scripts and really know the technology and Demon."

Cantwell also said Demon's open, generous fair usage policy should be a selling point to certain potential customers.

"We think people are more and more aware of fair usage policies, and also the fact that many ISPs hide them in small print," he said. "Our only challenge is that many products are marketed as unlimited when they're actually not, so how do you get around that? We're going to be really honest about it, but some of our competitors will say it's unlimited."

Cantwell said it "would be good for us" if the Advertising Standards Authority came down hard on such advertising claims, which the watchdog said it was considering this week.

While Demon's standard connections are limited to 50GB a month, its business packages are currently completely truly unlimited - which Cantwell admits is not sustainable. "We will put a fair usage policy in place, but it will be the most generous you'll ever see," he said, adding it should be about 100GB a month, but overnight downloads won't count to let businesses do backups and other maintenance in slower demand times.