ISPreview takes a look back at the year that was 2000

Now as we near the end of what has been a truly dramatic year in terms of ISP changes, we can now look forward to a completely new generation. At the beginning of November Oftel announced FRIACO2, which is what FRIACO1 should have been, only with improvements over that.

Soon after and the ISP Breathe.Net became the last of the truly low cost ISPs to bite the bullet on unmetered, claiming that even FRIACO2 wasn't viable. Any other providers of a similar nature such as RedHotAnt had already long proposed price increases in order to stay alive. Leaving only the likes of Connect25 and IGClick behind, the future of either remains in question, although changes to both have already occurred.

As the last of the first and second-generation providers die off, we now look upon a slightly brighter future as third generation and now fourth begin to take hold and sprout. What's fourth generation you ask? Thanks to FRIACO2 it's ISPs (larger/well established ones) that will be charging between £15 and £20 per month with no underlying metered charge. This means the ISPs will have greater flexibility and be able to improve services or offer new packages.

It's a system that many of the ISPs holding out for FRIACO1 have now decided to adopt, as it'll finally bring some realistic options and prices. Freeserve, ClaraNet and several more have already privately announced their intentions to adopt the system for late January/Early February 2001. Existing FRIACO ISPs will also be able to take advantage of it and of course will because of the savings involved.

FRIACO2 has the potential to topple all of the older models, including BTSurftime, although it isn't perfect. Unless you're a very big ISP then offering a competitive price would be hard, the bigger you are the less profit per customer you need and thus the more competitive in price. As such FRIACO2 isn't ideal for smaller ISPs and certainly not for newcomers.

Looking Forward

Looking further into 2001 and we can't help but expect BT to delay FRIACO2 despite Oftels express wishes; delays are a typical thing for BT to do in order to remain anti-competitive. That said and we will eventually have affordable ISPs with good quality services and support once again, things should finally level out through 2001.

FRIACO2 will mean that heavy users being called 'abusers' should eventually be a thing of the past and ISPs offering affordable dual channel ISDN and no cut off are now economically sustainable and affordable. Quite how the industry will actually level out is impossible to say, we can only speak from experience and insider information.

Whatever happens it'll be better than it was through 2000 and late 1999, 2001 will bring the changes we've all been waiting for.

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