BT Fusion update

Well, despite my cynicism from last week, it looks like Fusion is indeed actually happening, albeit relatively slowly. According to comments I've got from BT, the company started processing orders on Sep 28th.... which sort-of gets them off the hook from their earlier claim for "the service being widely available for delivery in September."

"Processing orders" involves weeding out those from the extensive (20k+) list of those who've registered an interest. BT has to contact people, confirm that they're still interested, and that they are "eligible" for Fusion. Eligibility means being a BT Broadband customer, and not having a long-running mobile contract that can't be transferred.

Through the rest of Q4 BT is likely to be focusing on this backlog, marketing to other existing BT Broadband subscribers, and attracting new BT Broadband customers (presumably with some sort of bundle or introductory offer). It'll be interesting to see if BT can come up with a consumer broadband supplier-switching strategy that gets around the email portability issues I talked about last week.

If I had to take a guess, I'd say this means the company is probably looking at signing up perhaps 30-50,000 subscribers by the end of 2005, or maybe 50-100k if they've got a cunning Xmas marketing promotion up their sleeves.

If anyone's actually got a Fusion phone, I'd love to hear some feedback on how well it works (the phone, the Bluetooth AP, the handover, customer service, setting up the Home Hub with your PCs etc).