Redten Internet offer FREE computer woth £500 if you sign up for 3 years @ £19.99 pm!

stratford_2 · 3 November 2006 at 9:55AM

I read a PC Pro article last week, that showed that:

" 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."

They are now taking orders and I've put it on the grabbit board as red ten are upgrading the 17" monitor to 19" for the first 10,000 customers who sign up.

More details at www.redteninternet.com Terms and conditions are here (pdf) and essentially the main requirement is that the PC only becomes yours after the 3 year broadband contract ends. If you end your contract early they can ask for you to send back the pc, in good condition, at your expense. There are various packages available and you should check out the small print, but otherwise it looks like a pretty good deal if you need a new computer!

FREE PC worth over £500
with any 8Mb* Broadband Package
- Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor
- 512MB DDR2 Ram
- 160GB hard disk drive
- DVD player/rewriter

- 19” LG LCD monitor
- Microsoft Windows Vista
- 3-year warranty
- 365-day support

Mandles · 3 November 2006 at 10:08AM

i wonder if it will be like that deal that i nearly did a while ago for free computer? it allowed loads of adverts and you had to look at them all.Sounds good but theres always a catch isnt there...maybe me just being super negative. sorry.

tr3mor · 3 November 2006 at 10:17AM

Thats not a bad deal at the moment.

In 3 years time though the computer will be out of date and I would imagine broadband would be virtually free anyway.

greyster · 3 November 2006 at 10:20AM

and also broadband won't be near £20 a month in 12 months time, let alone 3 years. Still a good deal but thats where some of their profit will come from. Fixed price 3 years.

stratford_2 · 3 November 2006 at 10:21AM

@ Mandles. That's a good point - the pc pro article mentions this:

"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. "

philhuff · 3 November 2006 at 10:30AM

Well, if you're in the market for a new PC and broadband, it's a pretty good deal. Total cost is going to be £719.64 so, assuming you can buy a similar spec PC for £500, you're paying about £6 a month for your broadband.

Apart from a few emails coming through, I don't see any hidden catch. The big bold catch is paying £20 a month for three years, but that should be pretty obvious.

I like to look through terms and conditions, and this particular one made me chuckle. I know it's only to cover themselves for anything that goes wrong, but considering the deal on offer, this clause is amusing...

5.5: However, we cannot guarantee that the equipment will work with our Broadband Service

:-)

philhuff · 3 November 2006 at 10:42AM

Just to add a valuable addition, there's a £49.99 connection fee, taking the total cost to £769.63. Taking out the £500 for a PC, that makes the broadband connection cost £7.50 a month.

stratford_2 · 3 November 2006 at 1:37PM

tr3mor wrote:

Thats not a bad deal at the moment.

In 3 years time though the computer will be out of date and I would imagine broadband would be virtually free anyway.

Yep, the computer will be out of date, but I bet a fair few MSErs are quite happily using computers that are 3 years old now! As for the price of broadband - that's going to more tricky to identify as more and more providers bundle services together. Personally, I don't see broadband as 'free' if you have to pay for a service plan for 'free calls' or other services. Also, worth bearing in mind that many of the current free or cheap broadband deals have limitations in speed or usage which this offer seems to be free from (subject to a fair usage policy). That said, I do agree a good quality broadband service is unlikely to be £20 / month in 3 years time, though looking at the overall term cost this could be a very good deal, if you need a new computer now!

sambo31 · 3 November 2006 at 1:41PM

You also need to have a bt line to apply.

jakemuk · 3 November 2006 at 1:53PM

well you do for any adsl service so your post is errm useless

greyster · 3 November 2006 at 2:09PM

You may find the PC is not worth £500 but it doesn't look bad.

Redten Internet offer FREE computer woth £500 if you sign up for 3 years @ £19.99 pm!

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