Buy broadband, get a 'free PC'

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 25 Oct 2006 at 11:34

Redten Internet is raising the stakes in the highly-competitive broadband market by offering a free PC with every connection.

The company will offer a Pentium 4 based system to every customer who signs up for three years of 8Mb broadband, costing £19.99 per month. Redten - the sister company of Watford Electronics - promises to upgrade customers to a 24Mb line, when the BT exchanges are upgraded.

It's not the first time companies have attempted to give away free computers with internet connections. In the late 1990s companies such as US-based Free-PC gave systems to customers prepared to sit through a barrage of on-screen advertising, but the business model failed miserably when customers failed to click through on the adverts or even sold their free PCs.

There are echoes of the Free-PC model with Redten's offer. "There will be a web portal which will have revenue streams - we'll be selling advertising space on the portal, and also emailing offers to people from selected companies and partners," said Nick Mounfield, marketing manager at Redten. The company insists that, unlike the American offer, customers won't be forced to watch adverts and that they can change their internet homepage from the Redten portal, should they choose to.

Redten also hopes to cross-sell IT products from its Savastore.com brand and other electronics retailers. It claims to be partnering with BT, Intel and Microsoft on the deal.

The free LG Redten Internet PC has a retail value of £500, according to Redten, and ships with a 17in LG LCD monitor (with a free 19in upgrade for the first 10,000 customers), 160GB hard disk, 512MB of RAM and Windows XP Media Center Edition. A voucher for a free upgrade to Windows Vista will be included in the package. More expensive monthly packages are available which include extra hardware such as printers and wireless routers.

The service will go live this week. You can register your interest at www.redteninternet.com.