Just found this press release from BT:
Take the hassle out of home IT with BT's personal touch
BT Broadband installed in your home by an engineer from £50.00 per visit.
Home IT problems solved by a BT engineer from £75.00.
‘Virtual engineer’ service can troubleshoot PC problems remotely for £9.99 a month
Enjoying the broadband revolution is now easier than ever before with the launch today of BT’s competitively-priced new home-based broadband customer support service, BT Home IT Visit.
BT Broadband customers can arrange for an engineer to visit their home and install broadband from £50.00 per visit. In addition, anyone with a BT line can request a Home IT Visit for assistance with any IT-related problem or situation for £75.00 for the first hour and £25 for each subsequent half-hour.
Following three months of successful trials, BT now has a team of up to 2,000 specially trained engineers who can visit customers in their homes to help them get on-line and get the most out of their broadband. Customers, for example, can request an engineer to help set-up a wireless router or network, and attach printers or other devices. An engineer can also give your computer a health check and show customers how to back-up data. In addition they can give help and advice with installing and configuring a new PC, including backing-up and transferring data across from an old PC.
Emma Sanderson, Director, Value Added Services for BT Retail said: “People are becoming increasingly dependent on broadband to help run ever busier lives but not everyone has the time or the expertise to set things up or maintain them on their own.
“Our new service is designed to help people exploit the full potential of broadband and make it really work for them. There are a host things that people know they want to do but are not sure how to. For example, sharing files, photos and music between computers on a wireless home network or linking other devices like gaming machines and iPods.”
The Home IT Visit service follows the launch in March of BT Home IT Advisor - a service which gives customers a single point of contact with a team of highly trained advisors dedicated to providing comprehensive support for customers’ PCs, networks, applications and up to 20 devices for the home. The service can even create a ‘virtual engineer’ in your home by enabling an advisor to securely ‘log on’ to a customers’ computer remotely and troubleshoot a problem for no additional fee, above the £9.99 a month subscription.
This service has already become one of BT’s most popular with more than a thousand customers signing up each week and over 96 per cent of customers telling BT they are very pleased with the service.
I wonder if this is something the players in the local market would try doing.
#
