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UK ADSL packages Announced By British Telecom
jac writes: "BT have just released news of BT Openworld -- BT's new broadband portal and high-speed Internet service using ADSL technology. The home-user service is £39.99 a month with speeds up to 512 kpbs, connection is via a BT USB modem (Win 98/2000). I wonder if we'll see a lot of UK effort going into Linux USB modem support in the next few months?" Good to see the Britons getting decent bandwidth.
BT, in return for being allowed by OFTEL to offer pay video services to the home, announce there will be ADSL available. BT trial an ADSL service, and offer a wholesale package to ISPs, and several big ISPs start signing people up to trial services. The idea is that there is an ATM 'backhaul' (I think this is the right term) from your exchange to your chosen ISP (or indeed video on demand service provider). I looked at the pricing, in connection with some ideas of serving 'niche' markets, like hooking up health clinics with video conference links, or media people to work at home. So far so good - visions of a world with competing and specialist providers for niche markets. Then, all of a sudden, in the words of the BBC article today: "BTopenworld, which was created earlier this month in a reorganisation of BT's internet operations." BTOpenworld comes on the scene. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_7 26000/726551.stm A brand new company formed by BT to capture this market. And they conveniently don't want to tell you that you can get the service from other providers - ie. they will be selling you their new service first. Sorry, it makes me want to vomit. It has all the hallmarks of BT's ISDN rollout - anyone remember the years they sat on ISDN?
This Guardian article reports on how the European Commission has just criticised BT for being too slow in rolling out access to the local loop to other companies.
The EC thinks they should do it by the end of this year, not mid next year.
Nice to know someone with a bit of weight is happy to throw the cat amongst the pidgeons.
...j
I've got an X.21 leased line coming into my house. I consider myself quite lucky to have it. No "online/offline" hours. However I sure pay for it. It's £350 a month plus VAT (which I don't pay, but still...). Wait for it... for 64Kb/s. That's Kb, not KB too!
Yes, I'm very jealous of everyone in the US for their cheap access, and yes, I have considered moving because of it!
The problem is twofold: BT is held back in part by being extremely money grabbing - they are (I think) the richest company in the country, and one of the richest companies in the world. They are also held back by their stock holders, who see the release of DSL in this country as a turning point - all those people paying up to 4p a minute on local phone access to the net will suddenly be paying a flat rate monthly fee. This is gonna hurt BT. Hence the ridiculous prices.
And yes, BT could have rolled this out much much sooner. They have the resources and the infrastructure. Don't believe otherwise. They have the infrastructure for everyone to have X.21 in their homes too - but the money they'd lose rolling that out prevents them from making it the price it should be.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
At least they have fixed the index.html page. Yesterday if you didn't have flash, you just got a blank screen.
More at The Register
Contention ratio of 50:1, with 20:1 for business users.
Being rolled out slowly - only a few major urban areas get it in July.
At least it's a start. They will probably overtake the clueless Cable companies. I have had a fibre optic cable almost to my door for years now, but they don't seem to want to sell me bandwidth.
So pick a different ISP that *does* let you have servers.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
No you're not. You're talking about BTs ISP service, which has all of the faults you describe. So simply don't use it. My ISP is planning to offer ADSL from July without all the BT problems. Of course, they're still limited to the exchanges that BT designate until the local loop is unbundled. Anyway, the basic package will be USB, 50:1 (and no NAT, IIRC). A 10baseT option will be slightly more, but nowhere near the £99/month that BT is quoting. Lower contention rates and faster speeds are also available. http://www.f2s.net for contact details.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
True, but please point me to somewhere I can buy a USB card for my SparcStation 4, my DG AViiON or my NeXT Turbo Colorstation (yes, I have all of these running at home). All support 10baseT, but none of them support USB. I hate the fact that everything is so PC-centric these days.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
No, but it will be by the time BT Openworld launches.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Anyone have any ideas why DSL is spreading faster then cable?
Because everyone has a phone line, and far from everyone have cable tv?
Good question - USB is no more widely used here than in the US, if anything it is less used since PCs are still a bit more expensive here, so more people are using pre-USB models.
I think they went USB in order to prevent businesses from just using NAT (now very easy to get hold of, even on Windows) and connecting a number of PCs (or even a medium size site - many companies still use 128K leased lines, so ADSL would be better even with these rate limits...).
Yes, it's a pain not having servers, but with always-on and a *nix box, it's relatively easy to poll your ISP mailbox every minute or so, which is not bad. The money I save on phone bill costs (easily 100 - 200 pounds a quarter) will pay for an inexpensive hosting provider (probably US-based because they are very competitive there).
Not at all ideal, and I wish they'd lose the server restrictions.
The installation fee is waved if you go for the USB-based service and pre-order before the June launch.
My biggest problem is not having any Linux support for the USB+PPPoE+other stuff - I may have to revive a Windows box just for this and use it as a router or something, at least until the Linux community comes up with some solution.
Well, it still seems to be on Linux - see http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.btopenworl d.com
Can you point me towards ISPs that do allow servers over BT ADSL service? I thought the ADSL modem was part of the BT ADSL service resold to ISPs - are you saying they can use their own kit?
Also - the ADSL service from BT has a network-based NAT (not a big surprise given the vast potential user base and the scarcity of IPv4 address space).
Although I really wish BT didn't have such annoying restrictions, it's possible that the lack of IPv4 address space is a solid technical reason for the use of NAT. Unless the whole world goes IPv6 it's hard to see any major provider deploying ADSL, cable or mobile Internet to millions of users without doing NAT.
CAIS Internet does ADSL-based services to hotels, and allocates a 10.x address to clients using DHCP - clearly there is a NAT there somewhere, but since it is static NAT (i.e. you get a whole IP address for your host, not just a few port numbers on a shared address space) it should be quite usable when combined with a dynamic DNS service such as TZO's (www.tzo.com, has clients for almost every OS and is quite reliable).
I think a static NAT based service is a reasonable way of providing a near transparent ADSL service - it economises on IPv4 address usage, but still allows active hosts to keep hold of their DHCP leases for long enough that their IPv4 addresses don't change too frequently.
In the UK this is not YET an option.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The "single user/home" service is based on a USB modem - what'll I do with my FreeBSD firewall now??
Looking closer at BT's "offer" shows that one can get an Ethernet connection - but that's labelled as the "business" service and costs 99 pounds (approx. $150) a month!!!
It's also a bit weird the way BT talk about the USB connection as "single user". Am I not allowed to use a Linux box as a router to a LAN with this (cheaper) service?
I damn well hope we get Linux USB support, as BT are charging £99.99 per month for a network (Router) solution. check here
Linux + IPmasq (NAT) will bypass this nicely and save me £60 a month.
Am I the only one who expected 768kbps only to find that BT are only guaranteeing 512kbps?
Also this is an single ISP solution ie Use BT's ADSL = Use BT's ISP.
Oh well, at least it's better than my 56k that never connects at 56k. (49k tops)...
Just ordered an ADSL line here, in The Netherlands. Reading the offerings in the UK I realized what a great deal I am getting. I get 4 fixed IP's, an ethernet connection (No USB, parallel or other weird port) 1024Kb downstream, and I get specific permission to run servers. I don't recall the upstream speed (I think it was half your downstream speed). Price is about $70 a month. You can get a 512Kb connection with one IP for a little over $30. They made us wait for this a long time though.
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
Never mind a UK effort, we really need drivers for internal DSL modems for Linux and *BSD. It's easy so long as you get an edge router that dumps to Ethernet. But now the telco's are offering internal cards with only windows drivers. It helps them stop NATD boxes/firewalls/proxies.
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes "Who Keeps the Keepers Themselves" ~ Juvenal
If it's the same service they're offering as part of the Demon trial, the ADSL 'modem' is also a NAT box. You technically *can't* run servers of any kind, irregardless of the AUP / T&C.
:(
Given the frequent gibbering about portals and content, and the above-mentioned NATing, I suspect it's a 'web-and-email' service rather than an Internet service. If it was a *real* IP service, they'd risk cutting into their ludicrously-expensive leased line market
Bah. I don't want facilities from my ISP. I don't want their mail servers, their DNS, their games servers, their 'unique content'. Not even their news servers, if I had an always-on link. I want a pipe, with some IP addresses allocated to me on one end and routeing on the other.
Regards,
Tim.
Yes, their web site is intentionally vague on the offerings.
You are right about the all the proprietary schemes they are using for the home offering. The modems use a proprietary windoze driver to connect to their servers, similar to how AOL works. Once you connect to theirs servers, then you can get access to the internet. Linux connections will not happen for a while, until someone gets desperate and hacks the protocols. They have some kind of proprietary authentication scheme as well, but I can't figure out when things get authed if the connection is always on.
The IP addressing is all on private IP numbers for now, and there is no direct routing to the internet. Its all NAT (ipmasq for the linux crowd), plus firewalls. What they wouldn't answer me was whether they would be actively scanning users machines for servers or any vulnerable open port. Its entirely possible this windoze driver does not allow a true IP connection anyways.
The Work service is also a joke, but at least they claim they will offer a 4 static IP addresses at some point in the future. You can NAT and hook up as many machines as you want for browsing and email. But there is still a firewall preventing any incoming sessions, so a company can't use this to set up a web server in their own building. The sales droids are now being trained on how to jump on any business customer who asks for this, and redirect them to a very expensive web hosting service.
Yes, we are stuck with this crap until OfTel gets some backbone and forces BT to behave like a responsible monopoly. Opening up the local loops hasn't killed any american RBOC, in fact their profits are the highest ever.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I know it's a new product and all, and I know it's market driven, but isn't £39.99 a tad on the expensive side?
If I'm not mistaken, that converts to ~$90USD! My telco has a monopoly on ADSL here in NB, Canada, and I only pay $39.95CDN/month. Which is more like ~$22USD.
Like I said, I guess the market will dictate.
Considering the cost of local phone service, whcih requires you to pay by the minute connection charges, I think this will be proportionately a bargain in the UK.
If you then use your ADSL connected PC as your telephone with a free DialPad-like service, your total phone bill may go down.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
This ISP doesn't seem to know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to security.
) :
A Quote from a zdnet article. (Which you can find at http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/16/ns-15055.html
"The personal details -- including addresses, home telephone numbers and email details -- of everyone who has signed up for BTopenworld's broadband service have inadvertently been left on BT's Web site.
A plain text file containing the personal details of nearly 7,000 consumers and business users who have registered online for the service has been exposed."
For the theregister's take on it, take a look at http://www.theregister.co.uk/000427-000028.html.
And then there was last month's similar blunder: http://www.theregister.co.uk/000327-000008.html.
I don't know about anyone else, but I personally would not feel comfortable using a provider that had these types of problem BEFORE they even start offering the service.
Not a problem if your me, I spent £100 on internet calls last month (and that was a drop from the last one)
They probably think they're really smart though!
Remember ISDN? BT went digital using a non-ISDN compatible standard, and had to replace much of the (relatively new) equipment with ISDN compatible stuff, but it never took off, as the price was just too high.
40 quid seems better than what I might have expected from BT, but it's still a lot. It's about a tenner more than ADSL from Deutsche Telekom, which is 768 kilobit downstream instead of 512, and goes up to 1.5 gigabits if you turn on compression (so I'm told by someone in Stuttgart who has it). Also, the DT offer uses a DSL box which connects to your machine(s) via ethernet, so no OS/driver problems there.
In Germany, we all like to hate DT for being overpriced, but it seems they're actually doing something good for once. Too bad I can't get DSL in my little village yet! :-(
-- SteveOne of the ones that got me was a report that ADSL, which was supposed to be released in April (the London exchanges have been for the most part open since March) was delayed because BT told OFTEL that there wasn't enough interest in their trials.
That's interesting, since I know about 20 people who couldn't get on one. Then I managed to coax out of a customer service operator an ADSL department phone number. Asked to join a trial, and was told that tons of people ask that but they're full up. Interesting, I say, referring to your company's refusal to release ADSL because you don't have enough triallists. Hemm, hawww... Uhhh... I absolutely swear that three days later this phone number wasn't working anymore.
So this is what us UKers face. ADSL for roughly 65-70 US dollars a month (when you can get 2 Mbps no contention in the US for 40 dollars a month) at a 50:1 contention ratio, ethernet not allowed, only USB modem. Did I say 50:1 contention ratio? Did I mention that some urban areas of London have such bad copper lines that you can hear the connection break when the wind blows?
Or you can get their damned Home Highway ISDN service, which is what I have opted for. Starting in June, with Surftime it should cost roughly 67 pounds for 24 / 7 dual channel ISDN and two seperate analog lines for phone calls (this is great for my setup, as my roommate and I need our own phone numbers and lines, and we can play Counterstrike together on the Net using a 64k channel each). But it gets even better, as I've just found out. BT always inadverently screw up the installation. What most people don't know is that the agreement you sign indicates they owe you a month of rental for each day that the installation is late. They don't tell you this, you have to read the fine print and bitch. Well, as a result, I now have 5 months free ISDN rental. Woo hoo! Starting to love this company's inefficiency. We've started joking that next week when the engineer comes we'll chop down the telephone pole until BT owes us for 30 months compensation.
One last thing about HH. It makes you sign a year long contact that is unvoidable by any means. If you move, you're screwed. No transferring the account. If you got HH before April 25th, you can switch to ADSL for free... If you sign a 3 year binding agreement. Nice company, huh? And make sure you don't use the BT Terminal Adapter. Pings of 70-100 compared to 30-40 in a net game.
For further reading, check this message board: Wireplay's forum for broadband. There's always insider info and tips here.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
BT have also done something in the past called Home Highway, which was supposed to have been 2*64K digital channels. The costs of this was prohibitively expensive too. I don't know of anyone that took that up either. Most people were waiting for ADSL to be introduced.
It wouldn't surprise me if BT also charge for each moment you use it. I also doubt that the £40 is a flat unlimited usage fee. They also subscribe to the typical British notion that if you have a computer, it must be a Windoze PC. Support for other machines and operating systems is only likely to come after substantial lobbying. Better start lobbying now.
I guess that London (as usual) will be the first to use it. Most of the country will be given the chance to use it - eventually, but I won't hold my breath waiting.
Hopefully, they will get kicked a bit by the regulator to speed things up.
M.
Wait until you get over here - phone lines are atrocious; once BT have their bugs stamped out I expect UK DSL to be an order of magnitude more reliable than it is here in the US.
Point of advice: when looking for an apartment, get one as close as possible ( 500m) from the Telco's exchange.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
I pre-registered yesterday, and I recieved this email in my inbox just a few seconds ago:
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 08:58:21 "GMT"
From: "btdigital@btinternet.com"
To: "xxxx@xxxxxx.xx.xx"
Subject: Your BTopenworld registration
Dear Sir/Madam
Re : Your BTopenworld registration
For a short period yesterday a hidden area of the BTopenworld site holding
the details that you registered was accessed by a limited number of
unauthorised persons. I am writing to apologise to you for this breach in security.
I would like to assure you that as soon as the problem was identified, we
took immediate steps to secure the site.
We are writing to those people identified as having accessed this hidden
area to get written confirmation that they have not copied, used or passed your
details to any other person and will delete or destroy all copies of this
information.
I can confirm that we are undertaking a full and thorough investigation to
ensure that breaches of this nature do not happen again.
Once again our sincere apologies.
Yours faithfully
Robert Salvoni
General Manager BTopenworld
--
Email reproduced in full, apart from my masked email address.
So...who wants to trust their 24 hour on connection to BTopenworld then?
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
-- js.
The previous BT logo was a blue T, the left hand bar of which was 2 dots. The joke was that if you turned it 90 degrees anti-clockwise, you got a little cockup, another 90 and you got a big cockup and a further 90 would give you an absolute balls up!
I'm not quite sure what you mean by oversight but BT was privatized about 20 years ago.
Seems to an outsider that the sight of one monopoly doing a deal to shore up another would attract some criticism from the Labor Party.
But this is Labour Party v2.1 which is basically the Conservative party as was. That's why the real conservative pary is having so much trouble: there simply isn't a need for two of them.
Blair is very keen on monopolies: M$, BT, Railtrack, and various others have all been in to see him at No10 and gone away happy. About the only one he doesn't seem to like is the Post Office, which is by far the best, most efficent and profitable PO in the world. So obviously we need to break it up!
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
BT OpenWorld have a telephone enquiry number: 0845 602 1263
;-)
OpenWorld are just one potential ADSL ISP. BT (the network) are required to wholesale the the IPStream data links to other ISPs at the same price as they charge OpenWorld (about £30/mth). The ISPs then add the IP layer, mark the price up, and sell it to you.
The Bad Thing is that ISPs buying ADSL links wholesale get only a 20:1 bandwidth ratio to carry the traffic from their subscribers back to their POPs. Something tells me OpenWorld may find ways to get round this...
On the hardware front, the unofficial truth is that you can use a 10baseT network card if you have an Amiga/Linux2.2/NT/non-USB machine; but don't expect technical support from BT for anything other than a single Win95/98 box or a PowerMac.
You may have to supply your own ADSL-to-Ethernet "modem" if you choose not to use the USB version provided. Of course, other ISPs may supply/support other equipment.
The real difference between the £39.99/mth package and the £99.99/mth "business" one is that OpenWorld plan to uprate the more expensive one to IPStream's 1M/256k or 2M/256k incarnation later in the year. The four-port router they supply on that deal is capable of this, whereas the USB "domestic" hardware is limited to the initial 512k/256k. This is how they justify the higher setup cost of the business user version (don't know how they justify the higher rental).
Back in "single-user" land, you get one DHCP-assigned IP number (presumably a real one). There is nothing BT can do to stop you typing "ipchains" to share the connection round a LAN
DuncanGibb@spammenot.ultramail.co.uk (still waiting for a password)
I just want vanilla IP service as well - however I have little choice if I want something priced at approx 40 UKP/month. The business service is 100 UKP/month and has a non-waivable installation charge of 260 UKP (Q: does this include ownership of the router + ADSL modem, or just installation of the line + kit?).
So, until local loop unbundling in July next year, I will have to live with the annoying BT 'outgoing only' service model. It's a pain, but still a lot faster than dialup access, so I can probably manage for a year or so.
I wonder what would happen if an enterprising ISP or hosting provider set up some sort of tunnelling server - i.e. allowing servers at home to be accessible via tunnel endpoints located outside the BT firewall, using something like GRE or L2TP to tunnel from home to the tunnel server... Probably BT would get upset at this, but technically it would be quite straightforward - just make sure the home system 'calls out' to establish the tunnel, then from that point it's just ordinary traffic, with any TCP SYNs inbound to servers at home nicely hidden within the tunnel.
For extra geek points, this could use HTTP as the tunnel mechanism (as in the various 'bypass your firewall' tools), for increased undetectability, or even IPSec, for increased security against monitoring. Something UDP or raw IP based would be best for performance of non-TCP apps, though.
Well, if you actually click on the link and go to the FAQ, it says 256Kbps upstream
========
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
If you live in one of the first roll out areas this is great. Problem is of course that only 10% of the population do, and some of them won't see anything for another year or two.
The rest of us will have to wait that long just to see when we might expect to get a connection. Couple that with the sparsity of Cable Modem providers and the general lack (or low quality) of free modem access and you find that the uk remains a technological backwater.
The government in all its wisdom wants us all to use the internet and make the uk a leader in e-commerce, but forgets that no one will help them unless they can enjoy the sort of access all you lucky people get in the US.
Anyhow, the Times has this introduction to ADSL in case you haven't heard of it and you can register with BT to be told when they have decided to roll out to your area over here.
There is no conspiracy
1. BT is regulated by OFTEL, so in answer to an AC, it is still under government regulation.
2. Oftel have given a generous amount of time to BT before it needs to unbindle the local loop
3. In this time, BT wil seek to tie in as many users to its pitiful services as possible - this (my view) is they ADSL is being lauched now.
4. ISDN in the UK was *not* promoted for about the first ten years of its life. Its only in the last couple of years that BT have pushed it. Why? I guess because there is little or no advantage to BT in users using ISDN.
5. Less than 6 months ago, Iain Vallance, the BT Chairperson, said stuff like "the internet is too immature a technology for UK business ... BT is acting as a lollypop man (person who helps schoolkids across the street) trying to save businesses from themselves".
6. ADSL rollout *might* reach 70% of the population by the end of 2002.
7. Why so slow?
8. To protect leased line connection charges - e.g. we pay circa $40,000 for an E-1 (2mbps) line, and are quoted $8,000 for a (wait for it) 64k line. If we can get 512k for $4,000 under ADSL, the scale of potential revenue loss to BT (profits of more than $1.4 billion per annum from a population of 58 million souls) is large.
9. Bottom line; BT is doing the *least* it can to increase offerings, the *most* it can to preserve its monopoly position.
I have just sent the following communications to BT and Oftel:
To BT I wrote:
And to Oftel I wrote: I urge all existing and potential ADSL users in the UK to send your own complaints to these bodies. I am sure most of you can write more persuasive letters than I did. Pick an issue: complain about the NAT, complain about the poor support for non-Windows addresses, complain about the restriction to single computer, complain about the contention ratio; whatever genuine complaint you make will help to drive home the message that BT are fucking us in the ass and getting away with it. We are the customers and we are not happy, either with BT's abuse of its monopoly or with OFTEL's old-boy-network, kid-gloves treatment of the same.Suitable online complaint forms can be found here at BT and here at OFTEL.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm one of about 900 people who have been testing BT's ADSL since last April. BT are a large monopoly, so therefore they make clueless decisions. Initially we paid £30 a month for a 2Mb/s connection. We were given an ADSL modem and ATM->Ethernet router. After ~8 months, BT changed the trial to £50 a month at 512Kb/s. For real-world usage the 75% reduction in bandwidth was not a big deal, but the increase in price was. I still feel that £30-£35 a month would be about right, but £40 isn't as bad as it might have been.
BT seem to be focused on Windows and ignoring the many *nix users on the trial. They have tacitly acknowledged that we exist by providing us with the information needed to connect with Linux.
BT have not yet contacted us trialists to tell us about the official launch. What we have at present is the same as their 'multi-user business service' which they plan to charge £100/month for. If they downgrade us to the USB modems then I probably won't be able to use it with Linux and will be extremely annoyed with them.
I can't wait for the local loop to be unbundled next year so I can switch to a clueful adsl provider!
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
Basically we are stuck with this crap setup until BT are stripped of local loop monopoly