Brits Have Best Bundle Deals

Britons pay the best prices for bundles of phone, digital TV and broadband.

Bundling together services like digital TV and broadband, along with landline phone, has become more commonplace internationally. But if you’re looking for the best prices on bundles, you should move to Britain (although you’ll pay more for virtually everything else!).   According to a study by government watchdog Ofcom, about 40% of British households use these bundled services, which involve a flat monthly fee to receive landline phone service, broadband Internet and digital pay television.   The three together can run as little as $50 per month. That compares with an average of almost $55 a month in France, around $80 in Germany and around $140 in the US. A lot of this is due to extreme competition between companies in the UK.   But one outcome of all this is that Britain has the highest number of households with digital television of the twelve countries surveyed, at 76%.   Perhaps just as well, it doesn’t have the highest number of hours spent as couch potatoes. That honor belongs jointly to Japan and the US, where viewers spend an average of 4.5 hours a day watching the set. UK viewers spend around an hour less each day in front of the tube.