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ISPreview take a detailed look at the cost of unmetered for ISPs |
 Anybody whose been keeping up with the news of late knows that several of the biggest unmetered ISPs (LineOne, CallNet0800, AltaVista etc.) have fallen into the abyss never to come back. Upon their downfall each made remarkably similar claims, blaming everything on the impossible economics involved in offering a freecall (unmetered) ISP service. Blame ended up being focused on BT for not providing a suitable service and Oftel for their lack of push in getting BT to do so. While both issues are correct the ISPs themselves are just as responsible for their inability to predict the market. Before long the mass media finally started to pay attention to the situation and of course blew things out of all proportion, now ISPreview sets the record straight. It all started when.. Around May to June last year (1999) the first ISP to offer any kind of true freecall service arrived, named Screaming.Net it stunned people the country over. Unspeakable thousands joined and the service quickly found itself in dire trouble, overrun and under funded the service levels dropped in an instant. Screaming.Net became the first ISP to miss-judge the demand for freecall net access; being the first we can give them slack for just that reason. The ISP suddenly started to suffer system wide engage tones and slow download speeds that eventually brought the service to its knees for nearly half a year. It was at this point that ISPreview began its life (early June) and only a few months later we saw the second freecall ISP to arrive, 08004u. 08004u followed exactly the same pattern and managed to revitalise itself half a year later under the new name of EzeSurf. During this period new freecall options from the likes of ClaraNet and several other ISPs started to surface, the majority of which suffered the same fate. Before BTSurftime was even a pipe dream these few ISPs had manage to produce a workable formula, even if it had taken half a year to surface. Then around March BTSurftime was introduced, a standard set specifically for ISPs wanting to offer unmetered access. Inefficient scale Proving once again that profit comes before customers and service, the BTSurftime system never quite had the impact it was supposed to. Consumers had hoped that BTSurftime would bring cost effective web browsing without the cut off, bandwidth and service problems of the past. Instead they found ISPs that introduced a Surftime based system ended up with exactly the same issues. [Print Page | Next Page (2)]>>
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