BT offer £150 voucher to all - for limited time

It's not the first time they've been so generous - but the last time a £150 voucher was up for grabs it was only for people taking BT TV with BT Infinity.

That said, anyone tempted needs to move fast, as the offer expires at 11.59 pm next Wednesday night.

Credit: chrisdorney/Shutterstock.com

Anything you can do...

BT's big voucher offer comes hot on the heels of TalkTalk announcing they were selling their Plus TV package at half price for 18 months, in an offer stretching until mid August.

And until this week both TalkTalk and Virgin Media were offering new customers £100 in some form: a Love2Shop voucher from the former and a bill credit from the latter.

Not to be outdone, Sky have increased the level of bill credit they're offering to new triple play customers from £75 to £100 - and they're giving people a whole extra day to sign up, ending the deal on June 25th.

But this is a big one for BT.

We mentioned above how they've previously used £150 vouchers as incentive for people to sign up to Infinity, but as far as we can recall, they've never made the maximum amount available to everyone regardless of the service they take.

Usually the incentive is a Sainsbury's voucher worth up to £100 for fibre converts or £50 for those ordering an ADSL service.

There have been moments when they've bumped that up to £125 or £75 for a week or so.

In May, they seemed to be doubly affected: as well as increasing the value of the incentive, they switched to offering prepaid Visa cards rather than supermarket vouchers.

See latest offers on BT Broadband.

...we'll try to do better

It's not the first time providers have engaged in a bit of promotion one-upmanship.

Late last November, a couple of them ran very time specific offers to coincide with Black Friday, while others extended the limits of their generosity for a short while in the run up to Christmas.

But the latest round of special offers do seem to have been a little grander than usual - as we've mentioned a few times recently, TalkTalk have really thrown down the gauntlet with their unlimited SIM and Plus TV packages.

TalkTalk aside, are these shorter term, blink and you'll miss them, super generous offers the newest phase of the continued battle for custom?

There is an element of caution on the part of the ISPs in offering vouchers and bill credits, that isn't there when they cut prices upfront or offer cash back.

Both of those are pretty easy for customers to keep tabs on: most cash back deals usually promise a cheque or credit within a certain amount of time, and it's easy to see if a monthly discount is being applied to a bill.

But bill credits and vouchers that are only claimable once the service is live rely on customers remembering to claim them.

A small and annoying proportion of us are very good at this - but as we've written about before, Ofcom estimated that over the course of two years, the majority of us have managed to build up more than £10 million in unclaimed credit of some form with our telecoms providers.

So for those tempted by the offers around at the moment - remember to make good on them.