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AltaVista UK Withdraws Unmetered Service In UK
WhiteWash writes "AltaVista's UK branch is terminating its offer of unmetred access, and blaming BT for the trouble as the BBC says at their news page.
This was a good deal that provided an alternative to BT's monopolistic unmetred access options. Where does Britain turn now for unmetred access?" We originally touched on this subject a while back, for more background info.
Look at the ISPs that have a successful free-call service (like WorldOnline, ClaraNET). Their money comes from Calls and Access provision - where they operate (or partner with) a piggyback access provider (like Localtel or whoever) and take a decent cut of the call charges, while also being able to profit from voice calls made from the same number. The free ISP access essentially acts as a catalyst to get people to use your telecoms service.
The companies offering access for a 'one-time flat rate fee' don't especially inspire confidence in me - the disappearance of these services from the fly-by-night operations currently in place supports this.
Don't put all the blame on BT. Yes, the local loop has to be unbundled, but this is a much wider problem. The telecoms infrastructure in this country isn't marvellous, and, in some areas, still suffers from load issues. It takes time to deregulate an industry, let's make sure it's done properly. In the meantime, check CUT for details of the unmetered access issues.
They're not the only ones.
I'm online right now via Unlimited Freeserve Time, available to anyone with a BT line. This costs me 10 UKP per month, which I can (effectively) reduce by prefixing national rate calls with a dialler code. See, that £10 is technically buying that amount of national rate calls over Energis.
I've had some problems with a badly setup cache box on their system sending my firewall mad - and a POP server doing the same thing on a smaller scale - but in other respects they're good. No discernable difference in performance from normal Freeserve (perfectly good), but no phone bill.
I'm very happy with them and could recommend them to anyone else. Except, as a warning, that they're only taking 10,000 new users per week - took me 2-3 weeks IIRC to get added to the system.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I certainly agree that AltaVista's finger-pointing at BT is a desperate attempt to avoid blame for this unmitigated disaster.
Unfortunately for your illustrious company, however, it's a far too tempting target to shoot at. Regardless of the reality, the widespread perception is that BT is still a monopolistic quasi-governmental organisation with an inherent belief that the population of this little island should be gratefull for any morsels it happens to throw their way. You only have to look at the ADSL roll-out for a prime example (and ISDN before it) - BT won't even quote which *year* my exchange is going to be enabled, because I have the gall to live outside a megalopolis. Not that the so-called competition is helping one iota; you only have to look at the availability vs. penetration of cable-modem for that!
So you can certainly see where the temptation to "spin" this story came from... It's not like this result doesn't favourably affect BT after all - all those disappointed AltaVista users turning to the only other supplier of unmetered access in the UK (no prizes for guessing the company... Starts with a "B")
Regardless, in this instance it was wrong to attack BT. Just this once, mind!
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I'll be trying NTLWorld shortly for unmetered internet access, but I'll also keep my Demon account active - they're due to have 'SurfTime' offerings soon.
More details can be found at the following Register articles:
- AltaVista admits service a sham
- Alta Vista's world crumbles
- AltaVista mystery ends today
- AltaVista: the silence continues and the farce continues
- CMGI to buy ISP for Altavista
And the list goes on... And that's just from 1 source - talk about publicity...Richy C.
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Where does Britain turn? Well, FreeServe are offering unmetered use for a flat 10GBP a month!
You can really say that the service has been terminated - it never went live!
There are many options for a flat monthy fee connection in the UK...
The entertainingly cynical UK tech website the register has been running an entertaining campaign over the last few days appealing for any real user of the service to come forwards. This has been building up in the media, until finally AV admit the service is totally phantom, as are the happy satisfied users that they have been referring to in previous press releases.
It was all an out and out lie. And now they are trying to pin the blame on BT ( the now privatised, previously state-owned telco that has a near monopoly ovet the UK tel infrastructure). This despite the fact that there are other (admittedly smaller) ISP's who are successfully offering a similar service right now.
I wonder what Alta Vista are going to do with all of the user data they collected for pre registration ? Donate it to charity perhaps ? [hollow sarcastic laugh]
The state of the UK ISP is a real mess. I have just moved house ( I live in Bristol ) and I can't decide what the best company / route is for connectivity - DSL and cable modems are both real soon now vapourware in this part of the country, BT changes tack every two minutes , and smoke and mirrors tactics like this AV stuff make it even more confusing.
Alta Vista got a hell of a lot of PR for this in the UK, government commendations, newspaper front pages etc. I feel that their behaviour over this is criminal, and I would like to see them punished
-- Oh Well
Well I have been unmetered now for 6 months and I live in the UK.
:(
........
There are many unmetered access providers in the UK now. This is partly due to the initial Altavista announcement. From this point of view it is great that Altavista made the announcement in the first place but on the other hand is sad that it has fallen through
The state of the UK's current flat rate or unmetered ISP provider standard and level of service is poor and its plain to all involved that it is infact BT who are holding back this market. They seem to have severe problems handling the increase of traffic on their network. You get all kinds of BT announcement whilst trying to connect to ISPs now.. Things like 'Sorry there is a fault, please hang up and try again' or 'The telephone network is currently busy, please try again later'. These messages are created by the switches being unable to open a new connection, ie the switches are overloaded.
If you ask me BT must be cringing at the thought of the 'unbundling or the loop' that is being forced on them by OFTEL (the uk telecomunications ombudsman). Expect to see the BT stock take a hit and all kinds of nasty telepone problems.
Funnily enough none of these problems affect BT's own ISP btinternet.com
I'd put about 60% of the blame on BT, and the rest on a very naive AV. BT makes all kinds of promises when Oftel is watching, but they seldom follow up and drag out the process as long as possible. AV should have counted this into their business plan, but the suits believed BT and ignored their own people who were cautioning them.
I know personally several of the people who told AV to lay off all promotions and PR until BT actually turned up the trunks and calls could be passed. BT has a long history of screwing over any potential competitor, much in the same way american telcos behaved in the first few years after divestiture. They block access to equipment in buildings, cut power at odd times, jinx circuits, lose trouble tickets, and ignore regulator's demands.
So yes, blaming BT rings very true. But AV is also to blame for not realising this is business as usual for BT.
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
Anyway The Blueyonder serice is oversubscribed. Between the launch of the 24/7 service in February and July, it has been immensely slow or totally unusable. It was fine for most of July and early August (at least for me; others milage apparently varied).
This past fortnight however, the service became abysmal. No more than 2K/s download speeds from pretty much anywhere, epsecially through ftp ports. And on Friday night, all routes to the US were compeltely lost for about 20 hours!
The webcaching system they use is totally shafted; often showing porn sites rather than the correct site, but fortunately for me, the dialup area I am covered by doesn't use transparent caches, so that saves me those problems
I would love to know whether any other ISP would completely take down the network for 2 hours like they did on Monday morning this week (it should be mentioned on their service page at status.blueyonder.co.uk:888. OK it was at 4am, but it does seem rediculous to need to take the whole ISP down.
It is a good deal on paper and yes I am satisfied overall, but the failures are incredibly numerous and I will not trust their e-mail service, considering how often it fails.
Anyway, for £10/month with min of £10 on call charges it is a very good deal and the 3.99/month second phone line is also a worthy deal. Just don't exect as good a service as you might have had with other ISPs
ive been using telewest's unmetered access since feb. at £20 a month, its sweet.
the problem is that all the ISP's int he UK are waiting for BT to get their surftime thing done. i know this as i work for an ISP, for the last 3 months, theyve been delyaing the unmtered rollout, for no reason whatsoever. they just dont help. the isp are also doing ADSL access, again, delayed because of BT's lack of support.
they dont help, because they are making so much money from metered access at the moment.
the other problem is the consumers, the majority of the ppl in the UK (probably) have only been online since the launch of the "free" isps, (non-subscription) this wasvery bad, because att he time AOL were justa bout to trial an unmtered service for around £30 a month (~$70) but as freeserve were taken up so heartily they rejected the idea. and ever since, everytime someone suggested some unmtered access (first seen a year ago, trials by AOL) the consumers said: "why should *I* pay £50 a month???" sot hey stopped that plan.
the problem is nobody thinks of the future., and the press, they are to blame too.
everyone claimed how "bad" the service from telewest was, about 5% had a problem. most other people (like me) had no problem.
</rant>
- red red's quadmonkey quake news
"AltaVista's deal was different, and made feasable by relulatory prodding"
:-)
Putting it a lil bit more accurately: they didn't like BT's terms trading freely for line costs - so they went public with a huge vaporware in the hopes of getting our polls-obsessed govt to straitjacket BT via the telephone regulator (Yeah, they privatized the company and kept all the control. Govts, hmph). When everyone else - including BT - came up with me-too unmetered services, AV's plan floundered. Good tactical planning there by BT
Least, that's how it looks to me.
Briefly, BT is regulated by Oftel. However when BT says "this is hard to do" Oftel says "OK, how long will it take you". This is not a recipie for getting things done that BT doesn't want.
In this case BT has two major cash cows: leased lines (GBP 1000/month for 64kbits) and per-minute charging on voice and ISDN lines (a penny a minute upwards). Oftel, the EU, the UK government and just about everybody else want to knock these cows on the head because they are blocking the widespread uptake of the Internet. BT wants to keep them.
This has manifested itself in two main ways:
The only dodgy thing that AV did do was to pretend that their service was up and running with 10,000 users. The Register has the story so far.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I recieved my 'unmetered' (0800 number) NTL CD this week, after a _very_ long wait - it appears that new subscribers to the service were prioritised over existing customers. The account has a pin number (helpfully printed on the address label) and a serial number for the CD inside the package. It installs something called Gearbox, which runs at bootup, replaces Dial-Up Networking and tries to make you surf in its own 'customised' window. You can fire up IE/NS after you've connected, however. The setup offers you the option to install IE 5 or NS 4, but no opt-out clause, so you have to choose one. It seems not to bother if it finds a version on your machine, but even so it's a confusing bit of interface design. The installation does place an entry in Dial-Up Networking, but I couldn't get it to work that way the couple of times I tried. The service cuts off after five minutes of inactivity, or after two hours of connection. In practice, it seems to 'freeze' after 30-60 mins, requiring a reconnection. I've tried to change my password a number of times, and had a 'connection reset by peer' error every time. I've mailed the support team and received nothing back, though presumably I could ring their _£1 per minute_ helpline for an instant response. Obviously, the CD mentions nothing about getting the service up under Linux, and also informs you that it won't work under NT or 2000.
One good tip is that despite the pin numbers/serials, you can easily install the service on several PCs (if the Dial-Up number doesn't work on its own) by choosing 'reinstall' from the setup options and putting your password in. My flatmate and I are using the same service, despite NTL's claims that this wouldn't be possible.
I know it's a free service - as in beer (providing you don't have to call the helpline) - but even so, it smacks of crap and I think I'd rather pay a set amount for a well-designed and provided service.
I don't think free net access in the UK will work out correctly until we have a phone system similar to the US's, though American readers may wish to correct me here...
Don't forget those smart Americans who cracked the Enigma machine.
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--
E_NOSIG
From what it sounds, AltaVista was the bad guy in this situation. They promised big, provided nothing, and when people started to complain they started pointing fingers. One out of three is a bad practice to get into. Two out of three shows lack of thinking or disrespect for customers, but all three of them... I am shocked.
I thought that only in the USA could we get stomped by some faceless giant. Don't we own a trademark on that or something???
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
ZDNet UK has a list of ISPs offering unmetered access in the UK... along with information about costs and current availability.
The ISP you refer to is Telewest. AIUI their unmetered offer is only for people connecting via their own telephone network, which doesn't involve BT.
If you are in Telewest's service area then this is great: go for it. (I like my Cable Modem too). But outside their area you are stuffed.
(Actually I think NTL offer a similar deal.)
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Actually if you have an NTL phoneline like me already (only around £5 a month for a second one), you get completely free access, no matter what your phonebill is. At the moment I have a BT line, which i use for normal calls, and an NTL line, which is connected 24/7 on an NTL's 0800 dial up line. (for those americans out there, in the UK any 0800 number is free)
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
In packed areas like London I'm surprised people aren't just slinging ethernet out the windows. It'd be cool if they could build at least a city wide network that way (Possibly with wireless microwave links or bluetooth taking up the gaps.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I pay the bad guy BT £10 a month, and they give me access all the time I'm not at work. Which is good enough for me. Especially when they give me a freephone number to dial in on, and they don't complain when I stay dialled in for 56 hours at the weekend. What does that cost on *your* unmetered service of choice. Freeserve still aren't a freephone number are they? The best you'll get is 1p a minute, but after 56 hours? Bad Monopoly types they may be, but until someone matches them, they get my money. And this Service has run since March, before AltaVista service was promosed.
Sorry matey but that's a bunch of arse. Freeserve do offer an off-peak unmetered scheme via BT Surftime (limited to weekends and 6pm-8am) but their peak/off-peak (ie. any time of day) unmetered scheme is via Energis.
With Unlimited Freeserve Time (the Energis service) you pay a minimum of 10 pounds per month. As well as getting unlimited Internet usage, you can also make long distance voice/fax calls at a discount up to your 10 quid (if you want to make more, you can, but you pay extra).
Unlimited Freeserve Time has the following restrictions:
Yup, I'd hardly call that "unlimited" either, but it's good enough for me- my 'phone bill has gone down from 80 quid a month + rental to 10 quid + rental in one fell swoop. Neat.
Combine a 64kbps ISDN line, Unlimited Freeserve Time, auto-redialling software and a dynamic domain name plus a bit of socket/port wizardry and you too can remote control your PC from the office or run FTP/web servers etc.
Readers might like to know that the NTL offering, unlike Freeserve, doesn't support ISDN at all, not even 64kbps.
Find out more on freeserve.help.isdn .
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Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
BT is still in a real monopoly position in the UK, within the local loop (the copper running from exchange to peoples homes and offices) they have virtually no competition aside from a few cable TV companies who are still in the process of connecting people for their core business.
Later this year BT are supposed to be 'unbundling the local loop' but it's a case of I'll believe it when I see it!
Those unmetered services that are available (for example my local cable TV company (Telewest) run an unmetered ISP for thier cable TV subscribers) are so heavily over subscribed that they are having to stop taking on new accounts cos they physically can't get the hardware in place fast enough to service the demands.
To quote one of BTs own operators in a conversation with me in summer of 1992 "Well, it's [BT] not an honest company.".
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall