ISPreview take a detailed look at the cost of unmetered for ISPs

"Our rough calculations are that FRIACO will cost your ISP 60 to 80 per cent less than BT SurfTime, with £60pa being a reasonable estimate of how much it will cost an ISP to support a user; it may well be possible to have economically viable Internet access at zero cost (supported by advertising)."

Everything sounded wonderful, imagine, some 9 users on a single £400 port works out at £33 per month for a single user and £3.70 for a single user out of nine per month. Sadly for C.U.T they weren't telling us the whole truth, or at least leaving out the most important element, which Oftel states quite clearly:

"The price of FRIACO will be £424.25 for each 64kb of capacity."

Hold on, one of these ports costs £424.25 and has a bandwidth capacity of 64Kbps, yet is supposed to maintain 6 to 12 users! True this was a 100% completely no cut-off unmetered option and many unmetered ISPs at the time had high user to modem rations, but it's still expensive.

The problem with unmetered is simple, modern day freecall ISPs, for example RedHotAnt, can have user to modem ratios of 1:9 and be completely unusable. For an unmetered ISP to be even close to quality they'd require a 1:3, or at most, 1:5 ratio, under the FRIACO system even those would incur serious cost issues for an ISP. Not to mention there are still other costs involved, such as the fact an ISP has to develop it's own network to cope with demand and many other things.

If you wanted true unmetered (1:1) you'd end up having to pay around £35 to £40 per month, something many heavy users would agree to, but the general public certainly wouldn't. Then of course the ISP would require a profit and so that takes us closer to the £45 to £50 mark.

FRIACO Hybrid

So here we are, only just today after months of waiting and anguish, WorldCom have finally signed and agreed on an updated version of FRIACO. The details are not yet known, but unlike its predecessor the new system is partly metered. Don't worry, this doesn't mean there won't be any 24/7 options, but it does mean the costs involved can scale themselves for usage better.

Lets put this in perspective so everybody can understand; if you don't use Surftime or FRIACO then the only way to offer a freecall/unmetered service is to use a 0800/0808 (freecall number) option. Based on a standard 24/7 layout that would mean you pay a flat fee per month for 24/7 unmetered accesses. The difference is that every call made is metered at a cost of around 0.9p (often less) per minute and this is charged to the ISP.

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