Consumers are increasingly being offered up to 8 Mbit/s and faster broadband services as standard but with no corresponding price hike

Freedom2surf will now be offering broadband connections costing just £13 per month for speeds of up to 8Mbit/s.

The service has a 512Mb usage cap, making it suitable for those who only use the connection for email and light web surfing. Activation costs £50.

The company will continue to offer higher-priced packages for heavier users.

Wanadoo Plus, a new service from the French-owned ISP, is a three-in-one package that includes broadband at up to 8 Mbit/s speed, wireless internet and internet voice calls, will cost £18 per month, while the Max package, which is uncapped, will cost £28 per month.

The wireless and phone call facilities are provided using the company's Livebox kit. A basic Starter pack, which does not include wireless networking or phone calls, will cost £15. Both Starter and Plus packages are capped at 2Gb of usage per month.

Be, which is making use of local loop unbundling (LLU) to install faster ADSL2+ technology in exchanges, is boasting a top bandwidth of up to 24 Mbit/s. It said it will install its equipment in a further 96 telephone exchanges by May, bringing to 156 the total number of exchanges enabled for Be's services.

Although all 60 exchanges enabled so far are in London, the company says that Birmingham and Manchester will be the first two cities outside the capital to be enabled. Although the full speed is difficult to attain, Be said customers near to those exchanges currently enabled are getting speeds of 15 -18 Mbit/s

Be's prices start at £14 per month for a capped up to 24 Mbit/s service, with the uncapped service costing £24. A telephone number checker on the company's website will tell users if their exchange is included in the company's current plans.

The faster speeds will help with the rollout of news services and applications. These will include television streamed over broadband connections, video on demand and movie download services which require high bandwidths.

To this end, cable company ntl will begin testing a 100Mbits/sec broadband service from March in selected homes in Ashford in Kent.

Calling it a bandwidth-on-demand service, the user will be able to access up to 100Mbits/sec when they need it, for instance to download movies. NTL recently staged a demonstration of three high definition TV streams on the service that still left bandwidth to spare for other internet uses. But the company said the service was some time away from any consumer launch.

The company said will also test the popular file sharing technology, BitTorrent to evaluate its usefulness in delivering ultra high-speed legal video downloads.

Consumers should be aware of the words 'up to' as the speeds on all these services. They may not be able to reach the maximum speeds as these will depend on the distance of the customer's house from the exchange and quality of the line.