May 4, 2000 - May 17, 2000

News - May 17,2000

VisualDepth Speeding Up

By:mark @ 9:05:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

While discussing another matter with the people behind 'VisualDepth', ISPreview was able to get some exclusive info on their status:

"Some additional news on the service that you may wish to publicise to your visitors is that we are now activating accounts very rapidly and we are carrying out a huge expansion of our support telephone system here by doubling the support staff and the number of lines that you can call through on therefore customers should no longer receive a busy tone when calling support. Also, I have recently read your ten items which a Good ISP should have, I think Visual Depth is well on target to providing all of these things."

So far VD is looking extremely good, no service problems or any real support issues, however they have a long way to go. We'll be able to judge how well they perform once everybody has been activated on their ISP, until that time registrations remain suspended - good move.

News - May 16,2000

Cableinet Help

By:Daniel @ 10:57:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

If you need help with Cableinet or Blueyonder or just want to talk to cable internet users then come over to #ukcable on efnet.

Compuserve Problems

By:Daniel @ 8:10:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Today Compuserve users were unable to access the net after the ISP had technical problems.

The scale of the problem is not known. Nor is it known at this stage how many people were affected.

The Register said:
"A spokeswoman for CompuServe said: "Some people were unable to get online. The problem was due to a minor systems error. We don't know how many were affected."

Compuserve don't normally get many problems so this was a surpise to us when we heard about it.

Source: The Register

C.U.T On LibertySurf

By:mark @ 6:52:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Many will already know that LibertySurf is more than just a new unmetered ISP, for those that don't then C.U.Ts (Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications) latest article might help:

"LibertySurf, a consortium including Kingfisher (marketing), The X-Stream Network (Internet Service Provision) and Level 3 Communications (telecommunications) has announced an offer which gives anyone with a BT line unmetered Internet access for £20 a year.

This has rather stolen the thunder of AltaVista, which announced a similar offer a few months ago but has yet to release it.

How can such a spectacular offer be done?

The main reason is that Level 3 Communications has been spending £10bn on building a network from scratch solely using IP (Internet Protocol). IP is the way of the future, being much more flexible and capable than PSTN (telephony protocols), which all previous unmetered offers have used.

BT SurfTime, of which much more later, will exploit BT's new IP
networks in a similar way."

You can read the rest HERE and ISPreview believes 'LibertySurf' is one to watch. A very interesting article indeed.

RHA Problems Solved?

By:Ashley @ 6:09:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Sorry for the recent lack of updates, but I have had all sorts of problems steming from the CIH virus, but back to ISP News.

We have noticed that RHA have become much more stable and we have been able to connect first time every time, at all times of the day. Is this to continue? We doubt this due to the reliability of RHA in the past, but we hope this is the end of a "bad patch" for RHA, and maybe.. just maybe.. they are getting back on the right tracks.

We are certainly much happier with the performance of RHA, and we can see some potential in the service, which in the past has been pulled back by problems.

RHA Modem Rack Problems

By:zeon @ 1:24:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Ian has sent us this e-mail that he received from RHA regarding the modem rack problem:

"The upgrades that were mentioned on our webpage have been installed. However, we are having a problem with the configuration of some of the racks, this is why you are having problems accessing any websites.

We aim to have all of these problems remedied by the end of the day. As stated above, we only have problems with some of the racks, so if you try to connect a few times you will get an active rack."

System Problems

By:mark @ 12:53:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

It's amazing that I've made it a whole year without having to install Windows98 again! Normally I'd be doing the usual re-installs once every three months, however the Athlon seems a lot more stable than Intel CPUs for some reason. Doesn't make sense to me either =), still what works.. works.

Either way it's time to re-install and for me this means a full network clean, so I should be out of action for a day or two from today or Wednesday. I've found that reinstalling fixes the IE5 ISPreview page crashing bug that occurs for 7% of our readers, so that's a plus point.

Now all I need to do is gather together the drivers I need on the third hard drive and pile all the apps up ready to go on the clean system once installed. Quite when I'll start is uncertain, however I need to get it out of the way so if I don't update again for a day your'll know why =)

EzeSurf Support

By:mark @ 10:24:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

While most of our time is being spent fixing some issues with the new server, complaints about various ISPs continue to flood in (will update complaints today). Not least for EzeSurf, who still seem to have serious issues with support and DNS timeouts that remain un-fixed.

Thankfully light is at the end of the tunnel since 'Richard Barrie' seems to be back after vanishing for some time:

"Sorry I have not been around as late, My computer here in the office just kept crashing and I have become attached to it so I am doing my best to keep it (sentimental about my Sir Clive). At the moment I have had to reinstall windows and at the moment my hard drive is trying to recover allocation units. I have accosted Kevin's workstation as a temporary measure and hope to get back to helping you all out.

I will update the http://ezepeople.homestead.com today and mail the list also.

Again I can only appologise and tell you all I have been feeling lost
without being able to get into the heart of this newsgroup and help over the last couple of weeks, but I am back now and I will try not to leave again!

Richard"

You can E-Mail Richard here richard@services.ezesurf.co.uk or simply make an 0845 account and pop along to 'ezesurf.support' for their support newsgroup.

On a side note, since we can't get a reply from Eze's phones on the subject, we could do with your (the readers) help in solving a problem. We have one of the original (NOT SurfSaver) accounts and want to get 128Kbps access, how do we get a second account under SurfSaver and maintain our original login/pass (needed for multilink) for 128kbps ISDN?

You can't just sign-up for an extra account because you get a new L/P, which means you can't multilink as the L/P needs to be the same.

News - May 15,2000

DNS Problems

By:mark @ 7:19:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

WARNING, please use http://www.ispreview.co.uk to access this site as http://ispreview.co.uk is somewhat of a server paradox. http://ispreview.co.uk shows the old page because it's held in physical server memory (we believe) and has yet to rotate out.

*Update*
Due to the cross-server (Old and New) problems, several days of news and archives have been lost. Sorry about this, good thing there hasn't been much to report anyway.

RedHotAnt Steaming Forward

By:mark @ 7:16:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

RedHotAnt were kind enough to inform us that their service should now 'Officially' be back on track. Their website doesn't say this yet, although it does have a status update:

"15th May 2000 17:57
We are currently upgrading our POP server. You may experience some problems receiving emails. Please be patient while this essential upgrade is implemented."

However only a few minutes into the new server and complaints about 'slow speeds' are now starting to arrive, as expected. Before nobody could login (barely) and now all of a sudden the system is swamped, the question is, what action will they take?

*Update*
Engaged tones also seem to be common place at peak hours, RHA still have a lot to fix in terms of 'service quality'.

ISPreview On-Line - LIVE

By:mark @ 6:53:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Vispa and ISPreview are proud to announce our ISP partnership is finally on-line, offering everything you would get under 'Vispa Internet' and a little more. We've secured some extra web space for those that sign-up under ISPreview and users will also get extra benefits (ISPr specific competitions etc.) in the future, some of which remain secret for now.

You can sign-up above (main table) and we can reveal that Vispas Unmetered services are on time to start in around two months time. They have a 155mbs network to replace the old 45mbs (currently at half its capacity) so it should be pretty speedy. Not to mention they have plans for ADSL (News archives have more details).

So please sign-up if you fancy seeing how the service performs, this is one ISP we can keep tabs, on and make sure that when unmetered arrives on it, you get good quality services. If you already have a good set of ISPs then give it a miss, signing up now will help avoid the 'unmetered' rush later.

ISPreview does not provide technical support directly for this system as the networks are not managed by us.

New Stuff @ ISPreview

By:mark @ 6:42:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We've got a lot of new Internet Service Provider Reviews and Articles up for all you to read:

New Articles:
ISP Censorship:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/articles/censorship/
A very detailed three page article on how ISPs are slowly being forced to censor information that isn't even provided by them - !A MUST READ! - Quote:

"Privacy and Censorship are two of the same, have one and the other is sure to follow as both carry a similar array of rules, albeit grammatically different. It’d be a shock for people to learn, but our own government (UK) already has the power to read every E-Mail and intercept any file. In essence they can know what you’re doing, when you’re doing it and more often than not, whom you’re doing it with."

Ten Ways to Success:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/articles/tenways/
A look at the ten areas ISPs continue to neglect and how they should go about fixing them - Quote:

"If there’s one thing that any ISP registrant knows, then it’s that good services and support can be a hard thing to find in even the best of ISPs. After conducting several surveys and asking ISP users the country over, we came up with what we believe to be the definitive ways to a successful ISP. This is almost certainly one aimed more at the ISPs rather than the customers, however it should make a good reference for customers that believe their ISP could be better; now you can see how."

New ISP Reviews:
Care4Free - ( http://www.ispreview.co.uk/reviews/care4free/ ).
Business Internet - ( http://www.ispreview.co.uk/reviews/bi/ ).
Compuserve - ( http://www.ispreview.co.uk/reviews/compuserve/ ).
Internet for Business - ( http://www.ispreview.co.uk/reviews/ifb/ ).

Hope you enjoy the new material, our 'ISP Censorship' article should be of particular interest.

New Server - LIVE!

By:mark @ 6:37:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The new server is live, we have some new content but require a further couple of hours to update certain systems. Normal news services resume as of now.

News - May 8,2000

Moving on out

By:mark @ 9:33:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

I'll be somewhat absent today as we have a lot of work to do in moving the site to the new servers. As you already know, this process is going to take a few days (possibly a week - hope not) and so most of ISPr's updates will come from our other editors and not me.

As such I'm putting a freeze on ANY internal page updates until I say it's ok. So to the staff, don't update listings/complaints or add any new articles/reviews. This means our new articles/reviews and service we had ready for launch will NOT go up until we have moved over.

Sorry for the delay folks, but that's life.

RedHotAnt Update - Working

By:mark @ 9:29:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

RedHotAnt, who spent last week upgrading their systems, seem to finally be getting it together. Their upgrade completed sometime during the early hours of Saturday and after that the system was peachy.

We've heard lots of 'good news' about them from their customers and one complaint amongst them (every ISP has at least one). We tried ourselves this morning and found that 80% of the 'Authentication Issues' had gone and that we could dial-in almost every time!

So things are looking up, however this is not a time to tern face and go back into a normal routine. With thousands of backlogged subscribers and RHA intending to open subscriptions up once again soon, there's still some cause for concern. For now at least, it's silent.

4theNET go unmetered

By:mark @ 9:23:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Net4Nowt are reporting that the well known FREE 0845 ISP '4theNET' are to go unmetered:

"Details are a bit scarce at the moment, but the new ISP service will be 24/7 and will cost £15 per month."

Yet another unmetered ISP into the fray then, although most people are wondering whether 'Visual Depth' will pull things off or not.

For more on 4theNET, head over to Net4Nowt and shower their page in loveeee...... =)

News - May 7,2000

F9 to offer unmetered packages

By:Ross14 @ 9:09:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Some news off the topics of RHA and Visual Depth.

From June 1st, the company behind F9, PlusNet, will be providing unmetered net access. PlusNet will provide an off-peak package and a 24/7 package using the BT SurfTime packages.

Packages will include unlimited mail boxes, unlimited web-space, CGI access, and a Fax2Email service.

ADSL will also be supported by PlusNet, when and where available.

Source: Net4Nowt

ISPreview Weekly Update

By:mark @ 12:39:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Almost forgot about doing this, it's been a hectic week you see and we tend to use the weekend as a break, only updating a couple of times. Not to mention that it is pretty nice weather outside for most of the UK, so why are you inside looking at a computer screen =)? Anyway, those of you eager enough to be reading today are no doubt wondering what's up here @ ISPr.

Well our server admin has set-up the new server accounts for a ton of our hosted sites, hopefully they have transferred all the files as well, but it doesn't look like they’ve done ANY! However providing they do transfer the files then we should be able to configure their attributes and get things rolling.

Following on from above, this basically means that next week will be spent moving the site onto the 'super speedy' servers. However amongst this there is some good news, our own ISP will launch and we'll also put up a ton of reviews and a couple of articles to keep you going.

Other than all that there's not much to report, from this point on we are spending time on ISPreviews current content. Expanding, improving and fixing any areas we see that need a little makeover, such a process is likely to last up until June 1st.

Well have a nice weekend and enjoy the sun, if you live near an attractive beach like us, then get down there! =). For those stuck in rain, hahahaha =(

Visual Depth Update NO.3

By:zeon @ 7:16:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The latest news from Steve Redfern:

We are still activating accounts and this process will go on for the next few days, our sign up process is not 100% automated like some other ISP's. Therefore we can only activate a certain amount of accounts at one time. Activated accounts should receive 0800 Dial Up Information within 48 hours! The delays are not entirely our fault and have been caused by some of our associates. Our service routes through British Telecom and Ezesurf, however the Dial Up Access is not held by either of these two services but we are backed by them therefore giving them certain responsibilities. These responsibilities have not been kept therefore causing a delay in the sign up process. However, we can guarantee that once users are signed up on the service they will be given nothing far from Excellent service.

Our Telephone Support Line is currently very busy, but we are only charging people £1 a Minute due to the lack of funds. Our Service does need to be supported and we cannot have every customer calling in without paying any charge at all. Please remember that providing 24/7 0800 Access usually costs us over £99.98 (Our Price) a year. We are predicting that the company will run at a loss for over two years due to this.

The Visual Depth web site is currently being transferred to a new server due to the Credit Card problems we have recently had, we were unaware this would cause any downtime on the web site. However this has caused a few problems with accessing the web site from certain ISP's due to DNS problems. We have technical operators working on this now and the site should be back within the next few hours, however an alternative URL may be provided.

Can I just assure you that Visual Depth is not a Scam and we do not have anything to hide, we are always up front about what we are offering and what is happening in the service. Which a lot of ISP's lack! We do highly apologise to customers and we have closed for any new registrations as of now due to the current problems we are having. This will allow us to spend more time on sorting out the problems that we are currently experiencing.

Many Thanks,

Steve Redfern"

Any questions post them in comments and we'll forward them to VD.

News - May 6,2000

Visual Depth Update

By:Daniel @ 4:42:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We have just received this email from Visual Depth:

"The activation process for activating 0800 Service Access Accounts is now underway. All paid customers should receive dial up access details via e-mail within the next 48 hours. Again. we apologise for the delay and because of the delay all customers will be given an additional month on the service absolutely free. This will mean that you are a customer of the service for 13 months, your 13 months will not begin until your account is activated.

Please call Technical Support on 0906 960 0069 if you would like to see the current status of your account. Technical Support is charged at £1 Per Minute At All Times!"

When we read the first paragraph they finally seemed promising and it seemed as that there won't be any more delays. But the expensive phone charge just to see if your account is activated is to expensive. Also if over the next 2 days there is a problem with the service no one will be able to get through to them because people will be ringing about their account.

Paying £1 to check the status of your account isn't right. Its incredibly bad practice. ISPr advises people to steer clear of this ISP until there is actually an 0800 service running fine. Another worrying point is that the VD site also seems to have disappeared.

Visual Depth Update

By:mark @ 8:42:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Net4Nowt have done an update to their site about Visual Depths status:

"ACCOUNT ACTIVATION
All current pre-registered users will be sent account activation e-mails during tonight (5th), the e-mail will contain a URL where the user must go to activate their account. This will then give you complete access to Visual Depth Internet Services including 0800 and 0845 Access."

You can read the rest HERE, although remember to take caution if you choose to signup.

ISPr chooses to wait and see if this ISP manages to escape the connection and speed problems of the others. By its web design you wouldn't exactly think so =).

RedHotAnt Update

By:mark @ 8:30:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Ah yes, what morning would be complete without the usual RHA update?

"It's all happening here at the moment; engineers and cabling everywhere, the modem, connectivity and routing upgrade is here and its being installed.

We all hope that there will not be too many configuration problems ahead, and, lets face it, when I go online at home, I'm just another user with a 56K connection, I want instant log-on and lightning fast download; Its getting there folks, bear with it and our wait WILL be rewarded I'm also looking forward to getting a decent ping rate on our game servers"

That was sent late last night so clearly they weren't finished then, we hear some people have been able to get on but we also know the upgrade still is a few hours off completion. Waiting..

News - May 5,2000

RedHotAnt - Almost Fixed?

By:mark @ 6:53:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We had an E-Mail from one of our readers whom actually managed to get through to RHA (can you say, "miracle"?) and supposedly they said this:

"I spoke with them today (FRIDAY) they said, "hopefully fixed
by tonight."."

Thanks to Kevin for that one, perhaps Saturday morning will bring an Internet connection smelling of roses?

Visual Depth, where are you?

By:mark @ 6:49:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We've been getting a lot of E-Mails asking where Visual Depth are, well as you may remember:

"0800 LAUNCH ON FRIDAY
Our 0800 Service will be launched this Friday. This e-mail has been sent to you to give you one last chance to register for an account with Visual Depth 0800 before we completely close the service for new registrations due to the popularity of the service."

As Friday comes to an end there is still no sign of any activity from this much acclaimed unmetered ISP. As we said before, never sign up to an unmetered ISP before you've seen what those that do actually get out of it.

Hopefully VD (isn't that a sexual decease?) will be in contact soon to let everybody know just what's happening. Delays are never a good sign.

NTL CD Distribution

By:zeon @ 6:39:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The Register has reported on how NTL are delaying the distribution of some of its CD's.

"In a statement issued by ntl today the company said: "ntl is a responsible Internet provider and controls the number of disks -- and therefore the number of registrations -- to the service issued at any one time. That's why we've set up a queuing system."

This seems sensible to us, as they need to limit the amount of users subscribing to the service as this could cause an overload and everything would slow down.

On another note we received our CD just after they started distributing them!

Source: The Register

UPDATE:

The Scream! has received this e-mail:

"Your request for our genuinely free internet service, ntlworld, has been processed and we're aware that you're still waiting for your
registration disk.

We're sorry you may be waiting longer than you expected. We're sending
out thousands of disks every week, but as you can imagine the demand for ntlworld has been huge and we are making sure we are offering a robust and high quality service to all our customers when they sign up. We are able to bring on customers in some neighbourhoods quicker than others, so please bear with us.

We're committed to offering a genuinely free internet service for the
long-term and hope you agree a few weeks to wait is worth it for this
fantastic service. Please do not re-register for a CD or contact us by
phone - we have your request safely logged.

We'll be back in touch in two weeks with an update on when you can
expect to receive your disk and begin surfing the world wide web for free!

Thank you for your patience.

Customer Services
ntlworld"

RedHotAnt Follows The Bad Trend

By:mark @ 9:55:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

This certainly is a day for problematic ISPs, now RedHotAnt is back in the frying pan once again. With today (5th) being their last ‘scheduled’ upgrade period, after which we are promised top quality performance, it looks like make or break for the ISP named after a hot ant.

Initial signs don’t look good, now even ISDN users are finding it difficult to get connected, especially in the evenings when we’d go as far to say ‘Impossible’. We haven’t been able to login ourselves for nearly two days now, constant engaged tones are all that can be said. If by tomorrow morning these problems aren’t fixed then we know of several people who have expressed a desire to start legal action.

So the pressure is now well and truly on RHA, will they, won’t they, it’s anybody’s guess.

EzeSurf Worsens

By:mark @ 9:45:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Please stop the complaints E-Mails about 'EzeSurf' =), we can't update the page as fast as we get them. While current and 'working' customers such as ourselves feel Eze is a top ISP (service wise), new subscribers paint quite a different picture.

From the complaints we have had and 10's to 100's seen on their support group, it looks like the problems with E-Mail and Phone support have failed to be fixed as previously stated. This seems to be a problem with around 50% of unmetered ISPs, some of which haven't even gone live yet.

Our attempts to contact 'Richard' (tech guru) along with customer services via E-Mail and phone have proved fruitless as well. We decided to pop over and visit 'Planet Inferno', which is always a good place for EzeSurf news. Thankfully they did have an explanation for a small portion of the problems:

"As for Eze, their support group is currently embedded with whiners who, in their wisdom, signed up over bank holiday weekend and wondered why there was a delay. From a really good support community, the newsgroup is slowly turning into a hotbed of complaints. Luckily, at my end anyway, the service has not suffered."

Couldn't help but think, the only people that really need support should be the ones complaining right? That's the whole point lad =). This should explain a small part of the problems; the rest is basically down to EzeSurf not having enough staff to deal with everything.

Makes you wonder why they aren't spending the money to have these things dealt with? Hopefully they should be back up on their feet soon, Eze's really good when EVERYTHING works.

News - May 4,2000

ILOVEYOU Protection

By:Daniel @ 11:11:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We have just received this email from Vispa

Vispa Internet has had a basic scanning system in place
for over 4 months, like Cableinet we check all incoming emails and where possible remove the virus

However we would like to add to all users, not just Vispa users who we
alread inform on a regular basis that even though ourselves and a few other isps are doing similar fuctions, all users should still have a virus checker on a computer system local to themselves and make it's updated on a regular basis. Our advice to all is to download a FREE Virus checker called INOCULATE available for download from http://antivirus.cai.com/ which protects you against VBS-Love Letter.

We had a block in place at 9.50am 4th May 2000 that deleted all emails with the subject ILOVEYOU, therefore our mail servers were not effected with load problems.

To add to that also Claranet have a block for it as well. Also its a good point to show that Vispa regularly look at our ISPreview. They must know of all the unmetered ISP problems so when they become unmetered they will expect all the users flocking to their service and hopefully expect it as well.

C.U.T On C&W Takeover

By:mark @ 8:11:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

C.U.T (Don't know what it stands for? look below!) have published a brief article on how Cable and Wireless is being taken over by NTL. Frankly I can't wait for it to happen, that way my area might finally be able to get Cable Modems! =)

Read it all HERE.

Cableinet precaution

By:Daniel @ 8:09:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

BlueYonder/Cableinet just posted to their announce newsgroup the following.

"As many of you are no doubt aware, a new worm virus called ILOVEYOU started to spread this morning. To minimise the impact upon BlueYonder customers, we have put in place a system where all incoming files are scanned for this attachment and deleted if found."

We are pleased that they are taking this sort of precautions but we wonder if any other ISP's may have this system in place.

ILOVEYOU Worm

By:Ross14 @ 6:26:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

If you haven't heard already, a worm virus is causing mayhem in the computing world. The "ILOVEYOU" worm comes in the format of an email attachment called: "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs."

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED - DO NOT OPEN THIS FILE.

Huge firms such as Lucent, Credit Swiss, AT&T, Barclays and World Online have reported major difficulties.

If you need help with downloading protection files, then please go HERE.

C.U.Ts POV

By:mark @ 10:16:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Yet again the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications has had a site update, this time it's about 'unbundling the local loop' and the differences between what BT say, Oftel and the EU want. Hold on, I thought we weren't even in the EU 100% yet? Sometimes politics [Insert obscene phrase here] off:

"-BT has said unbundling cannot be done before June 2001 at the earliest.

-OFTEL has said it might be brought forward a few months.

-But the EU stated a few days ago that unbundling must take place, in all fifteen member states, by the end of December 2000!"

This is most certainly an article for anybody to read, at the very least because we all love a bit of controversy between the 'BIG PEOPLE' =). You can read it all HERE.

BTInternet Trouble

By:mark @ 10:10:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

You'd expect an ISP so old and experienced as BTI to have some clue as to how to update and keep a service running? Yet they don't seem to. Over the past few months its always been a case of working, not working, working, not working etc. and today we are back in the 'not working' zone. Over the last few days we have started to receive a small influx of complaints, some go like this:

"For the last week I have been experiencing random cutoffs on BTInternets 0800 service. They commonly occur within half an hour of connection."

While others are closer to:

"-Cut offs every few minutes reguarly.
-Newsgroups service shockingly bad.
-Terribly slow web surfing (down to 80 bytes a second for two nights in a row).
-The most arrogant "support" people ever seen/heard, "check your settings" (when working fine for any other isp), "no problems here".......
-Email server down more often than up.
-Still showing adverts on prime time tv when the service obviously can't support the current user base.
-Being able to "give" away 1 million pounds when they can't provide a
decent service as it is....."

Not a very good start for April on BTI's side then =(, we can't predict when they fill get their service back and we can't get a reply from them ourselves. BTI aren't exactly the best when it comes to customer communication, very 'corporate internal'.

We left BTI long ago after they decided that making money was far above the importance of actually providing the service money is being paid for.

Oftel 1999/2000 Report

By:mark @ 9:53:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Thanks yet again to the guys over @ Barrysworld for the heads up on Oftels latest changes. This time around its a report on the telecomm market for 1999/2000 so far, looking at pricing trends and quality of service, it's certainly interesting:

"Despite the phenomenal growth, the Internet is still not for everyone. In recent Oftel research, 18% of consumers claimed to have Internet access at home, still predominant amongst the higher social grades, younger age groups, and larger households with children. Older consumers (aged 55+) and the DE social grades are considerably less likely to use the Internet either at home or at work, although various reports suggest this is slowly changing and usage is becoming more universal."

You can read it HERE.

Visual Depth Update

By:zeon @ 7:44:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Another E-Mail has been sent around Visual Depth customers:

"News: 3rd May 2000

0800 LAUNCH ON FRIDAY
Our 0800 Service will be launched this Friday. This e-mail has been sent to you to give you one last chance to register for an account with Visual Depth 0800 before we completely close the service for new registrations due to the popularity of the service. Please visit our web site at http://www.visualdepth.com and follow the 0800 Access link for additional information and to sign up or call Direct Sales on 08707 415 115. Please sign up for an account now to avoid disappointment, as we may not open for new registrations for some time.

CREDIT CARD PROBLEMS
Our Credit Card problems still exist and we are attempting to clear all transactions as soon as possible. We will be activating all accounts on Friday regardless of whether your Credit Card has been debited or not. However, we would still advise customers to pay by Cheque due to the system overload in Credit Card Orders. Please e-mail Sales@visualdepth.com to change your payment method to Cheque or call direct sales on 08707 415 115.

AWARD WINNING HOSTING
Visual Depth has been given the UTUE International Web Hosting Award for Quality Web Hosting. We have recently released new plan structures and much lower prices, please see http://www.visualdepth.com and see the link to Hosting for more information. Whether you are already with a Host or not, transfer to Visual Depth. You cannot afford not to use Visual Depth as your web host."

Thanks to Charles and Mike for forwarding this to us.