April 6, 2000 - April 9, 2000

News - April 9,2000

C.U.Ts Annual Meeting

By:mark @ 9:42:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Those fellas over at C.U.T (Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications) have their second annual general meeting coming up today. There's not much in it for us though, it's really just for changing the staff around and adding new people.

The good news is that you can join in as well if you think the trip is worth it on a Sunday (odd day for a meeting):

"Our second AGM is on Sunday 9 April 2000 at 4pm.

The location is The Irish Club, 7 Lyall Street, London SW1 (nearest stations Victoria and Sloane Square)."

If you fancy joining C.U.T for their meeting then nip over to their website and read the needed information (link below). We would go but London is not exactly somewhere I want to go on a Sunday =), Monday would have been better.

Meeting Details @ C.U.T

News - April 8,2000

Visual Depth - Info

By:zeon @ 5:29:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The Visual Depth website problem was due to problems with DNS changes. The website is accessible through http://216.149.185.233/.

The details for the ISP are:

"The service being an unmetered 24 hours, 7 days a week 0800 Internet Dial Up Access.
The service will cost no more than £60* a year.
There is currently no plans for any cut off time, users may stay on-line as long as they like, providing their connection is active.
We will be guaranteeing users that they will be able to get through to access the service first time 99.9% of the time, No Busy Tones!
Our company also has plans to incorporate ADSL when it becomes widely available.
* means that the annual fee is subject to a set-up fee"

Visual Depth

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

This morning we received this e-mail from Visual Depth:

"Our company recently launched news (Yesterday) about a new service which we will be offering at the end of April. The service being an unmetered 24 hours, 7 days a week 0800 Internet Dial Up Access.

Official news posted on our site can be found on the homepage at http://www.visualdepth.com However, due to the content of the web site that you are running, I can provide you with the following additional information: -
The service will cost no more than £60* a year.
There is currently no plans for any cut off time, users may stay on-line as long as they like, providing their connection is active.
We will be guaranteeing users that they will be able to get through to access the service first time 99.9% of the time, No Busy Tones!
Our company also has plans to incorporate ADSL when it becomes widely available.
* means that the annual fee is subject to a set-up fee."

So we checked out the site but http://www.visualdepth.com is some Argentinean company called 2ksoft. Doing a domain look up brought up the same postal address that was in the e-mail we had received. We began to think this was some stupid hoax e-mail but after looking at visualdepth.com without the www. It seems that this is a UK company with a bit on the front page about unmetered access.

Well this seems very weird. We are investigating this further and hope to have more details soon.

UPDATE: It now appears that http://visualdepth.com has changed as well.

CallNet0800 Update

By:mark @ 8:28:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Thanks to 'James' for letting us know some important details about making a complaint against an ISP like CallNet0800 that might be breaking the law. If you missed yesterdays post then it's because they were charging people for using a premium rate number (not 0870 by the way hehe, that's national) while the users were on hold, which is illegal:

"Users should contact

The Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services @ http://www.icstic.org.uk, they license all premium rate numbers in the UK and are the governing body for them."

We hope that helps any people with problems, you should note that a number which charges 50p a minute is considered premium rate regardless (or so Oftel say).

News - April 7,2000

CallNet0800 Breaking the Law

By:mark @ 8:05:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Thanks to several readers for letting us know that ISPs who use a 'Premium Rate Number' (0870/50p a min etc.) and put you on hold while on that number, are actually breaking the law. This surfaced earlier today when we spotted this post on the newsgroups and had a debate with some readers in our chat:

"I understand that companies are not allowed to keep you on hold on premium rate numbers. I have just telephoned CallNet to enquire as to why its service has just dropped me, and fails to validate my password, and was on hold for 10 minutes before giving up. This has resulted in me being charged £5.

Are they allowed to do this? It occurs to me that putting users, who are calling to enquire about poor service, on hold for 10 minutes on a premium rate number is appalling.

If they are indeed breaking some kind of rule, who do I complain to about this?
--
Michael"

That particular post got the following reply from a guy named 'Brian' which helped to spark out interest:

"You complain to OFTEL http://www.oftel.gov.uk/, and yes it is illegal to put someone on hold on a premium rate line. The reason being that the premium rate line owner (callnet) gets 2/3 of the money spent on the call, and the more people they put on hold, the more money they get."

Now forgetting all the other issues that could arise surrounding this and concentrating on the core issue, that premium rate numbers are not allowed to put you on hold! We investigated. To our surprise Oftel do indeed sight that ‘holding’ you while on a premium rate number is illegal. That means that ISPs like CallNet0800 and so many others are breaking the law!

We’d be interested to hear reader comments on this matter and if any of you know of other ISPs that do this on a regular basis then please inform us. Please take note, they only break the law if and only if they don't tell you the calls are charged at 50p a min or they charge you for the time you were actually on hold. However the case above does indeed seem to be illegal practice on CallNet0800's part.

Supafree Trial - Update

By:zeon @ 6:32:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

After commenting on the Supafree delay yesterday, this came into our mail box:

"Thank you for your patience with the supafree trial, we apologise for the delay. The delay has occured due to testing of the network. This is to ensure that the system poses no problems when the supafree trial goes live.

You will receive instructions on how to access supafree shortly."

Not long now!

World Online - Freedom 24

By:zeon @ 6:25:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

World Online is to announce details on its new unmetered package Freedom 24 on Monday. People on the existing World Online ISP have been sent e-mails telling them about Freedom 24. However is still unclear whether this package will be offered through Localtel (World Online owned telephone company) or whether Localtel will announce a different package on Monday.

Bug Fixing Update

By:mark @ 12:00:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

I removed just about all the banners and JS yet the page still tended to hang, a more radical idea is now being put into action. We can only assume that the hanging is because IE4/5 can't understand the un-structured HTML as well as Netscape. Our solution? To re-structure all of ISPreviews main page (inc. Header/Footer(s)).

This will take some time to fully complete, but should solve some of the smaller issues.

EzeSurf Update

By:mark @ 11:57:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We are STILL waiting for EzeSurf to reply to our last E-Mail, sorry we haven't updated you yet on the things we mentioned recently but we can't update without the proper information. Things seem to have gone rather quite at EzeSurf recently.. hmmm

New Stuff @ ISPreview

By:mark @ 9:54:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Today certainly seems to be quite a full day for ISPreview, in among it being a 'bug fixing day', we also have new reviews and articles for you =). The interesting things is that each of the reviews breaks new ground in some way or another:

Reviews:
FreeWire (Fastest ISP for ISDN that allows Quad @ 512Kbps!).
Freedom2Surf (The WORST ISP we have ever seen!).
Games-World.Net (The fastest for on-line multiplayer we have ever seen!).

Articles:
Cut Off times (A look at the effect cut off times are having on ISP users).

Well there you have it, I'd point out the Games-World.Net and FreeWire reviews in particular, if only for interests sake. Wow quad ISDN @ 512Kbps =), if only it was unmetered hehe.

News - April 6,2000

Callnet Sends Abuse Letters

By:zeon @ 9:42:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

A user of Callnet0800 has posted this on the NG's:

"Dear
It has come to our attention that you have been constantly connected to callnet 0800 for between 20 and 24 hours a day. This is not an isolated incident and has been happening on consecutive days as a regular occurrence.

It is not the policy of the company to provide leased lines, but to provide genuine free Internet access for residential customers to use while they are actively using the Internet.

We must remind you that commercial usage in any form is not permitted under the Terms and Condition that apply.

We require a return e-mail from you within 48 hours with a clear
undertaking that you will limit your connection to us just to the
times you are actively using your computer.

Kind Regards
Kent S.
Callnet Network"

I don't have a copy of the T&C's to hand, but if the customer is using the service for personnel use, can Callnet cut them off. The 20/24 hours is a bit excessive as you would have to be asleep some of the time and this would mean the user is hogging the service.

Source: Newsgroups

SupaFree Trial

By:zeon @ 9:08:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

After having received the initial e-mail and confirming we were still interested in taking part in the supafree trial, we have received nothing else from them yet. No welcome pack or extra information.

Well if it means £10 I'll be willing to wait a little longer!

ISPreview Hangs

By:mark @ 8:53:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Even I sometimes notice that ISPreview hangs under IE5 during loading, yet it seems fine under netscape. Since most of ISPreview is plain HTML then I can't see any reason for it, my best guess is it has something to do with one of the banners on side/at the bottom. Namely the ones with JavaScript in (always a hang/crash factor that JS).

If you have experianced such problems then post a comment saying so, no other problems other than that one have been reported. Currently the focus is on fixing this if it happens to more people than just me =). I'll do my best to sort it out tomorrow when I'll take all of the lower banners off-line one at a time until I find which it is.

Password Trojan

By:mark @ 7:57:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Newsgroup readers beware, the FREE INTERNET discussion groups have a post about '24/7 Access with this software' that is actually a trojan (virus) that steals your passwords and security details to your system and isp's.

CallNet0800 Clearing Backlog

By:mark @ 7:52:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Despite CallNet0800 saying that if you hadn't got your box by the end of February then you aren't going to get it, people are still receiving boxes after having signed up way back when in November'99. Amazingly we got our own box today, which was received with some extensive anger as we have repeatedly tried to close our account with them.

We can’t get through on the phone, our snail mail letters go unanswered and the chances if you getting an E-Mail reply are about the same as Tony Blair deciding to reduce taxes =). This resulted in our credit card being charged £20, what’s worse is that since CallNet0800 don’t accept ISDN, it means we can’t connect so need to change our line. This begs the question, how can you change the CLI line if you can’t even contact them.

We are really not very pleased with CallNet0800’s support at all, it’s not as if we haven’t tried all the methods every month since December. Now we are also hearing from a lot more people having EXACTLY the same problems and we can’t even contact CallNet0800 to resolve them, pathetic, it truly is.

Clean your cache

By:mark @ 7:23:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Might be a wise idea to clean up your web browser cache, the changes made to ISPreview have changed a lot of things and old cache tends to propogate over new information by accident.

Localtel\Screaming.net 24/7

By:zeon @ 7:07:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We have received a number of e-mails about the World-Online unmetered announcement. We can now confirm that the World-Online Unmetered 24/7 will be offered through Localtel/Screaming.net. Details will be announced next week.

News System is GO

By:mark @ 7:04:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Ok all, we have swapped over to the new news system which is a lot faster thanks to better file management. Another plus is that you can now post comments =), hopefully we can also get some of the older archives on-line as a source for older news as well.

Good News for all Cable I-Net Customers

By:mark @ 1:15:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

As you may know i am a member of Cable Internet and I have just received this email from them saying:

"In our continuing drive to improve our Internet Services, we are:

* Upgrading our dial-up systems to exploit the benefits of the new blueyonder platform. This has been specifically developed andscaled to meet the demands of our new hi-speed Internet service.
This upgrade shall take place on Sunday the 9th of April.

* Getting a new, more reliable, scaleable and robust mail server. This shall also enable a new web-based email system to enable you to access your email easily from any web browser, from anywhere on the Internet. Once the upgrade has taken place you will be able to use the new blueyonder.co.uk domain name in your email address.

* Having new personal webspace services. This includes support for Microsoft FrontPage extensions and 30MB of webspace. We've also improved the naming conventions used for the webspace address so that it shall now be of the form www.fredbloggs.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.

So there we go. Personally I think they will change their ISP name eventually. Nice to know they are doing something about the speeds.

AOL Lawsuit

By:mark @ 1:15:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

I have just found this from the register and it does not suprise me this has happened.

"AOL has been slapped with another lawsuit alleging that its AOL 5.0 software meddles with PCs and blocks attempts by users to subscribe to other Internet service providers .

AOL has denied all charges to date and claims the allegations have no basis in fact or law."

Sorry I haven't posted lately but i have had some problems with my computer.

Source: The Register

World Online To Launch Unmetered

By:mark @ 1:14:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

World Online, which has recently purchased Localtel, bun.com and Telicno, has announced the launch of an unmetered service.

Simon Preston who has just been appointed as WOL chief executive in Britain said it will detail next week the 24-hour, seven-day- a-week unlimited access in the residential sector.

This looks like it could be part of the Localtel announcement that we have been expecting.

BT Consider New Broadband Options

By:mark @ 1:14:PM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

With Cable Modems and ADSL already starting to filter out slowly into the public domain, BT is still keen to investigate even more methods as an article @ The Register is reporting:

"BT is looking to develop different platforms to deliver broadband services other than across copper wires.

A source within BT said the monster telco was toying with different technologies including wireless and satellite systems.

He wouldn't commit further or go into any more detail about the plans, but said that the investigations were prompted by BT's cast-iron pledge to provide everyone in Britain with phone access.

The reason for BT's dabbling is that ADSL technology will only cover some 80 per cent of the British population once it is fully installed up and down the country.

The remaining 20 per cent, people who live more than a stone's throw away from their local exchanges, would be left broadband-less...or not, as the case may be. ®"

Some of ISPr's staff know the the feeling that the last paragraph echos so well =). Don't know about you but I'm going with 'Internet Hyper Gate' hehe.

Source: The Register

Unbundling the local loop - update

By:mark @ 1:13:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The Register has a detailed and interesting article on how it is pushing for the unbundling of the local loop in the coming weeks:

"Fourteen operators have been selected to start moving their kit into BT's local telephone exchanges as a precursor to unbundling the local loop (ULL), Oftel announced today.

The ULL trials -- which will begin in January 2001 -- will provide a taster for what is to come when BT is finally forced to open the doors to all its exchanges in July 2001 and allow other telcos to compete with the monster telco.

Battersea in London, Edinburgh, Leeds and Belfast are the four areas that will trial the new open door strategy.

The 14 operators involved are: Colt, CWC, Easynet, Eircom, Energis, Fibernet, First Telecom, Global Crossing, Kingston Communication, MCI Worldcom, NTL, Telewest, Telinco and Thus.

According to the winged watchdog, operators will submit requests shortly to install equipment in the relevant exchanges. In September, they will be able to place initial orders to rent space to co-locate equipment in BT's exchanges."

There's more on that @ The Register, this can only be good for consumers although perhaps not so how for share holders. Maybe this is what should have been done to Microsoft in America before it got to big =)?

Source: The Register