NTL yesterday gave the government's plans for 'Broadband Britain' a much-needed boost with the announcement of fast internet access at the same price as most British web surfers are paying for unmetered internet access using a traditional dial-up modem.

NTL is offering cable customers access to the internet at more than twice the speed of current modems for £14.99 a month - the same price as AOL's unmetered dial-up service. NTL's package is not strictly a broadband product. Broadband technology such as ADSL allows access to the internet at nearly 10 times the speed of current modems. Instead industry experts yesterday branded the NTL service as "broaderband access".

NTL's director of internet, Bill Goodland, said the service was designed as a staging post to broadband services, but consumers would still notice the difference compared with dial-up internet access. "The objective is very much to put in place an easy step towards broadband for customers who are already familiar with dial-up services."

The service will also help the heavily indebted company ex ceed its target of 100,000 high-speed internet access customers by the end of this year, a rise of about 30,000.

NTL's announcement was welcomed by the government which is pushing hard for more people to get online. Douglas Alexander, the e-commerce minister, said: "We are committed to ensuring that more UK consumers should have the opportunity to benefit from fast, always-on internet access and this is another step towards that goal."

The news will put pressure on BT to produce a similar product for use by other internet service providers.