ISPreview ask the question, does unmetered actually exist?

For a short while we had sustainable freecall access, but then after a few days the problems started and continued to escalate. Many ISPs followed and went on to suffer the same fate, seemingly unable to learn from the mistakes of the past. After a while the major Telco's started to recognise the need for freecall access and began to work with it.

Now, some one and a half years on, consumers are still fighting a battle to get a better deal, but why?

Unmetered Doesn't Exist - YET!

The short and simple answer is that unmetered simply doesn't exist for the average dial-up user(s) and this is made all the worse by ISPs trying to sell their product as the best and in the process offering the impossible. Consumers don't help either; thanks to the way most ISPs advertise their offers we have all developed a warped view of what the industry is trying to give us.

The chain of so called improvement has thus far gone from using a standard 0800 number to the miss-billed and confusion that is BTSurftime and now bang up-to-date with FRIACO. The problem is that not one of these mediums uses unmetered, the only reason most of us think of them that way is it's because that's what we're offered.

What's that you cry? "FRIACO's unmetered!"? Yes indeed, that's exactly how it started out, until BT and Oftel decided there were too many technical difficulties in doing that. As such the new generation of FRIACO, Alias - FRIACO Hybrid, has a partly metered charge on top.

So What's Unmetered Then?

Unmetered simply means you paying a pre-charge for an allotted amount of time, in the case of most ISPs that comes out as a monthly fee. Between these times there should be no additional charges, hence the term unmetered. The problem is that consumers are being offered a technology, which nobody has actually produced yet.

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