Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Month-to-Month Dial-Up 'Net Access in the UK?

Posted by Cliff on from the avoiding-long-term-contracts dept.

Wee asks: "I'm traveling to London (from the US) this coming Saturday. For various reasons I need to be able to stay occasionally connected to the Net while there. Instead of risking one of my daily-use laptops to the rigors of travel, I've built a working Toshiba 430CDT laptop from parts, purchased an appropriate power adapter, equipped it with an old modem/10mbps NIC (plus an Orinoco card, just because), searched Google for temporary two-week, UK-based dial-up accounts, only to find... nothing whatsoever. Zip, nada, nothing. Maybe AOL, but I'd have to think long and hard at giving them a credit card. I did find some companies that would sell me a monthly plan, but there were usually minimums. Does anyone know of 'temporary' dial-up accounts (with various local PoPs) in London? Failing that, does anyone know of an ISP I can sign up with for only one month?"

3 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Don't sign up at all by Howie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Assuming you already have a mail account that you want to access, then don't bother signing up to anything. There are many UK ISPs that offer "0845" access - these numbers are charged at local rate from anywhere in the country (don't forget that we still are charged for local calls in general), and make their money from revenue-sharing with the telcos, so you don't pay a bill to the ISP. You should be able to pick up a CD/Installer/Signup-Screen for one of these pretty easily.

    Drop me a line if you need help - my employer offers such a service (usually through resellers, but anyway).

    --
    "don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
    1. Re:Don't sign up at all by bob_dinosaur · · Score: 4, Informative

      Example providers of the you-just-pay-for-the-call service are Freeserve No Ties and Tiscali Pay As You Go. No credit card or personal details required.

  2. Try this - no signing up required by steve.m · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's basically a BT dialin, but yahoo branded

    0845 609 1350 (local call rate)

    login: "yahoo" (but it seems to accept anything)
    password: "" (again, it seems to accept anything)

    DNS: 194.72.6.52
    DNS: 194.72.6.59
    DNS: 194.72.6.57

    (it works with Linux PPP, using PAP auth)