Prices for Internet service came tumbling down across the sector late this week with the island?s three other ISP?s duplicating significant price cuts announced by Logic Communications on Tuesday.

While fbkNet COO Allison Thomas said his company would let its customers know they would match any price offered by its competitors, North Rock informed customers on Wednesday that it would drop its unlimited dial-up service to $19.95.

The price for higher speed broadband DSL service with unlimited access dropped to $29.95, with the price of $69.95 and $139.99 for 256k and 512k respectively. The prices are exactly the same as those announced by Logic earlier this week.

?We don?t want to lose any customers and hopefully we?ll attract some new ones,? North Rock?s Vicki Coehlo said. ?We think it is fair pricing and it will meet the customer requirements.?

Mrs. Coehlo anticipates that this will be the end of the price decreases in this sector since the latest cuts put Bermuda Internet service on par with North America. She local providers are finally able to offer such good price for several reasons.

?The international bandwidth prices from six to seven years ago have come down and there are also economies of scale. The Internet penetration in Bermuda is very high so when you have more customers it is less expensive to deliver the service,? she said.

Bill Dickinson, senior vice president of Transact, planned to today to reduce his company?s 128k and 256k pricing to the same price as the competitors.

Transact will however drop its 512k pricing even further to $99 and for the first time offer customers 1Mbps for $199. On Wednesday the company automatically doubled the bandwidth for all existing customers.

Mr. Dickinson says that his company has led the way in reducing prices but still has an edge over competitors by offering uploading speeds that are the same as download speeds.

He said: ?Transact was the first ones to reduce the price of Internet in Bermuda and what is happening now is the other competitors are starting to follow suit.?

Over at Fort Knox, fbknet was e-mailing its customers to say that it would match whatever prices its competitors offered.

Ms Thomas said: ?We want to ensure that our customers have the same prices so our immediate response is to match anything that Logic or the others are providing until we can conclude what our next price drop will be or that might be it but certainly we?re matching all of the prices of the other providers.?

Mr. Thomas said that it is the consumer who benefits from this type of competitive environment because everyone wants to continue to be competitive and offer their clients the best rate.

He does not think however that this will be the end for price cuts in the ISP sector.

?It probably is not the end of it, but I don?t think it will get much lower. Some of the high end products or higher speeds might come down. You have hit rock bottom when it comes to dial up.

?It might move but it is not going to be a significant move in any direction for awhile,? he said. ?This will be something all the entities will have to chew on for a little while because obviously it will make a significant impact into some of the company?s financial structure.

?Companies are really rolling the last dice when it comes to Internet pricing, but there are going to be some distinguishing factors that are going to happen over the coming months like service which we already established ourselves and other things, but price wise if you look comparatively speaking in reference to prices overseas we aren?t that far behind right now.?