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Starhub today announced a little bit of "bait" to get thier dial-up customers to try some delicious green broadband. The idea it seems is to get these stalwarts of the 56K to try the blazing quickness of 4mbps, and once they have experienced the way the real internet is supposed to be, there is no turning back.

On the face of it, the logic is kinda sound. All you have to do is trump up like $80 to get a Starhub modem and ta-da! instant speedy internet. A win win situation for dial up users. Of course the devil is in the details.

Let's take a look at some of the sites that Starhub is making available to this scheme, Live Messenger, Yahoo Singapore (including mail), MSN Singapore (including Hotmail) and all domains ending with .gov.sg. This is by no means the exhaustive list (you can go here to check out the full offerings) and they do say they will be updating it but for a start this are the sites that i would be interested in.

So i have lightning fast instant messaging and i can check my emails with super quick efficiency. Not to mention, i can now search for stuff i need and get my results lickity split, but if i actually want to go to those results, i'm kinda out of luck.

I will give credit to Starhub for trying though, its a valiant effort to move more of thier dialup customers to the more lucrative broadband market. The problem is those people that have not moved over are not doing so for a reason. Making their switching costs high ($80 for something they already think they do not need) and severly limiting the real broadband experience is not going to make many of them switch over.

My suggestion to Starhub is this. Make it so ridiculously stupid for people not to move over. Send free cable modems to your dial up subscribers (0 swtiching costs). Don't limit where they can go (give them the real experience). Charge them a flat fee that is competitive with what they are already paying for dial-up (make it a no-brainer) and limit them by data or time usage instead. They are already light users and will be hard pressed to break a reasonable limit of say 5gigs a month, and at the same time, this will discourage the heavy data leechers from exploiting this new plan.

Link to Starhub's press release:

StarHub Press Release

Dan