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Cheap Dial-Up ISPs Gain Ground
prostoalex writes "PC World takes a look at the proliferation of sub-$10-per-month Internet service providers and notices that the market for low-priced dial-up access is actually up in this weak economy. The low rates, with $4.75 per month quoted as the cheapest, are not abundant with features, and many of the dial-up providers don't give you an e-mail account or Web space, but it seems to be a plausible option for many. But reliability is a big issue, since 'about 20 of the startup ISPs [...] shutter within a year.'"
I travel a lot and would love a cheap international dialup account. No frills, just a connection. With yahoo, hotmail, VPN, web access to corporate email I do not need webspace or an email account. Now, If I could find a way to bypass those annoying hotel sur-charges for phone calls.
-- Andy
We've had free ISPs in the UK for years now, such as Freeserve etc., which are profitable because they receive a proportion of the call charge (local rate call, nation-wide), rather than it all going to the telco. Also, there are a few which had 0800 numbers (free numbers), and rely on advertising banners. While living in the states, I was somewhat bemused by the complete abscense of free ISPs, and still can't understand why they can't operate on the british model, surely it isn't *that* difficult to set up a deal with AT&T, or whoever they're connected to. Ah well, just my .02$.
Its the incubent telcos who are milking profits form old technology.! Look at countrys like Japan, South korea, Sweeden. 10, 20 even 100Mbit connections for less than DSL in the usa. Look at Australia, Greece and Ireland as examples of incubents at their worst.
It is the same here in Norway. In fact, only idiots actually pays a montly fee, unless they a) have it thru their job (meaning the company picks up the bill) or b) has broadband and thus ain't using the telephonewire for access.
For the benefit of our US friends who may wonder how the ISP can survive giving away free service with a usefull numbver of perks (e-mail adresses by the handfull, webspace and so on), lemme point out two things that explains why. Firstly, we pay by the minute to use the phone, no matter if we call grandma or to connect to the net. Secondly, the major ISP in Norway are also telcos...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Because they make it very difficult to change the ISP. I always like to use anonymous (you gain nothing from NOT being anonymous in this world) email accounts with chinese email providers which are muh more "secure"(!) than (lets say) Hotmail (or an ISP) when it comes to warez and other stuff of importance :).
I used to get dialup, then dsl from flex until roadrunner came into my town. They were, and probably still are, the best dialup isp in Hawaii. The AOL rant was the main reason I signed up.
It would be nice if there was a similar discount cable isp that didn't need to send out two guys just to turn on dhcp.
Hopefully, WiFi should make connecting to the internet from around the world a painless alternative to dial-up. Of course, I would expect small charges to access them. But I don't see why you couldn't have 1 hour access for a few bucks. That should be enough time to grab your e-mail and small documents over VPN to the local drive.
Life is not for the lazy.
Why would you expect the same to happen in the UK or elsewhere? I consider it fair to pay for what I use. Use more -> pay more. Actually I think at least wireless (as in mobile phones) is going to cost per bit instead of the older per minute cost. This is in Finland, where I live. And yes, we had "free" phone calls outside office hours before the internet. Well, 10 cents per call, time not limited. Guess what happened?
People would call their ISPs every friday at 17:00, and then keep the connection open until monday morning 8:00 just in case they'd need it. This was hell for small ISPs (which were the cheaper ones). Sometimes it would take hours of trying and listening to a modem before getting a connection. Sure, this was back in '95-'97.
Now, I'm a happy ADSL user, but I can always go back to using the connection provided by a computer magazine I'm subscribed to. Yay, costs nothing extra (anymore). They even gad a super-cool BBS before the Internet Age.
Point anyway; it's sensible to pay per use, if the use is significant. Back in the old days the ISPs had far less lines than customers. I suppose this might still be the case.. Although digital data changes the picture; it will simply get slower for everyone. But, I'd like to pay per tv-program, because I don't watch TV much and I feel paying 50 cents a day (165$ a year) is too much as I watch tv at home maybe once a month. Gah, I'd even pay for music per-song, or per minute of listening rather than pay $20 for a copy-protected disk that I don't know beforehand and will probably forget about quite soon.
And yeah, I don't think it'd be a technical problem, even in USA, for the ISP to charge per-minute via the telco.
All major ISPs offer free dialup accounts in Sweden. The only catch is that you still have to pay about 2.5 cents per minute to our Telco monopoly... Well, most can get ADSL or LAN access for about $30-40/month, so it doesn't really matter anymore =) As a student, I pay about $23/month for a 10 Mbit connection.
Good points, but I would prefer a combination of SquirrelMail (or SSH / PuTTY & Mutt) and a dynamic DNS domain over a "freemail provider". :)
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
I've recently gone from ADSL (1.5Mb/s symmetric) back to 56k dial (on a pay-as-you-go account) due to a house move out in to the countryside. To be honest, apart from when there is more than one person using the link, it's perfectly adequate for Web (on relatively graphics-lite sites) and Shell access. The only downer is larger downloads which I can do at work and then just copy over at home on the Wireless/Wired LAN. I've also found that it stops me wasting nearly as much time on the 'Net doing "pointless browsing"!
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We have Time Warner Cable. Their service is so poor, we need a backup. As soon as DSL becomes available, we're moving to that. Until then, we need a cheap backup.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
They say they do, but they also have an extremely high churn rate -- users coming/going all the time. The moment that conditions change and users stop joining, their churn rate will hurt them badly. (That happened with the Source, Compuserve, etc, and were gobbled by the next fish in line.) I bet they count those 3 month free CD users as part of their market share too.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I personally think it's quite dumb to use ISP email accounts. It's a lock-in thing that prevents you from moving ISPs. At work (which is not anything to do with computers), they used to use dial-up, and used the ISP email account. About two years ago we got DSL, and a domain, and we're still paying $5/mo for the old ISP to forward that account to our domain mail. Lots of people still send to it, some people still have business cards with it, and I still run across the ocasional document that has the old letterhead with it printed on it.
A couple years ago, maybe email was not that big a deal. Today, we couldn't live without it. Using an email address that doesn't have stability (say the ISP folds..) would be like renting a phone number that could change at any time.
No web space - Seriously, how many people are bothered about that?
Agreed. There are lots of free providers, and if you're going to put up anything besides a quick place to post some files/pictures/whatever, get a domain. It's not expensive, and it's so much nicer than a long-ass url that has a tilde in it.
Speak before you think
I own a small ISP in Upsatate NY. We've been charging 17.95 for about a year now, and we haven't grown a bit. Of course, we haven't gotten any smaller though. I see us being required to adopt a $9.95 price plan, as these guys definitely are growing. We started in 1996 at 19.95/mo.
/.ers here in the isp business making that change? I'd be really curious to see how you've structured your business model to accomplish such a significant price cut.
For the past 6 months, I've been trying to get a business plan to accomplish this, while still maintaining ALL of the services in-house (no wholesalers, outsourced support, etc) but it is a tough nut to crack - especially if you want to make any significant $$$.
Any other
Here in Greece it's also hard to be a dialup service provider. These companies depend on other services in order to survive such as leased lines, VISPs, web hosting and even co-location.
Most of them even do their own web authoring since it doesn't come cheap to create a relatively modest web site. So the question is how can a dialup provider survive without these "added" services.
Even if you are not a "cheap" one and charge a great ammount of money you have to pay for modems (not to mention that an ISP that respects himself uses dialup access servers), 24/7 support staff, leased lines, billing software not to mention a small group of sales/market-droids.
I believe that the only way for such a company to survive is to use free software for it's infrastructure (linux firewall, squid proxy etc) and modular hardware. I know that a cisco access server with mica modems is too expensive but is also quite modular. No need to support 10 racks of modems. Simply pay a little more (you can also by them using leasing), consolidate and save yourself the trouble. Back in 1999 I worked for a small ISP (approx. 300 users) and we were using a Cisco 3460 with a primary isdn and mica modems. No trouble there.
I get sick of people seeing bandwidth as the only difference between dialup and broadband. "I only pay $9.95/month for my 56k. Do you *really* need 256KB/s downstream?"
Hidden costs (and inconveniences):
- Dialling up (telco) costs. This really adds up.
- Line rental (if you are running a separate phone line for dialup) or the alternative of sharing the phone line with the telephone (and we all know how painful that can be for everyone involved).
- *Unreliability* - dialup performance varies so wildly, with constant dropouts, busy signals, line noise etc. This seriously affects the first point also.
It's not just a matter of "dialup is fine for low bandwidth usage". I'd gladly pay broadband fees even for very little bandwidth -- the cost savings make it almost as economical, but a heck of a lot more reliable.
Disclaimer: I'm not from the US, so situation may be slightly different there.
And I'd like to plug mine. ;)
Everyone's Internet
All the email address I want with server-side spam filtering, and a webmail interface
300 MB web space with no transfer limits
Fairly good Usenet server
They have a proprietary dialer, but you don't have to use it. I use Windows dial-up networking and KPPP and it works fine.
Free tech support via phone, email, or IRC (yeah, IRC tech support!)
Unlimited dial-up access from just about anywhere in the US.
All for $10.83 a month, after the $29.50 sign up fee. I only get 28.8K speeds due to my phone lines, but it's better than nothing.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle