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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.'"
The Broadband companies and the Internet Porn companies are teaming up to get people to buy broadband connections for faster porn access.
They get them hooked via these cheapie dial-up outfits, then migrate them over to the cable or DSL when the porn addiction sets in.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
saying that you can get DSL-like speeds, i'm sure Joe Sixpack will get in on that $9.95 a month deal in a hurry.
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
All you need is a way on.
As for e-mail, you can use Hotmail, Yahoo! or any of the other hundreds (thousands?) of free e-mail providers.
Or, use Cyber-Rights for free, SECURE, e-mail that isn't gleaned by the hosts for marketing info.
Newsgroups? groups.google.com
If you have a way onto the 'Net, all the other stuff can be had for free.
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Nothing new in the UK - we have pay-as-you-go zero subscription dial-up ISPs. Had them for ages, due to the funny way non-geographic calls are charged. The receiver gets a cut, that's how these ISPs make money.
And frankly, the average browser user still only eats about 4kbit/s of bandwidth - you don't need broadband for many uses!
In Holland we've had free dial-up ISPs for several years. They earn their money because of contracts of KPN, the main dutch telephone provider.
Here is a plug for the sub ten dollor ISP I use
www.flex.com
It kicks ass. Good News Access, webspace with no transfer limits (if abused reasonable measures will be taken).
Domain hosting.
No automatic billing (web form, pay as you go).
Nation wide Dial-up
My favorite though is Server side SpamAssassin filtering. I have my e-mail unobfuscated on Transgaming, and have signed up with a few companies, still no spam.
There is no Customer service (but great help pages and user supported forums). has a disclaimer saying that it is for the techsavy and will not accept current AOL users.
I currently use them for the occasional times I need dial up, and to host my email with good spam filter, and still don't feel too gyped.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
the market for low-priced dial-up access is actually up in this weak economy
..but wouldn't this be for the same reasons that supermarkets have a higher turnover during an economic downturn? Or would you expect people to be more extravagant with their limited resources?
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.
There has been a boon of cut-price, unlimited dial-up and DSL accounts through a wholesaler called Comindico.
You basically set up an account with them, order so many lines at each pop and they place lines at each pop on a nationwide number or local number.
The VISPs can then value-add to that service (news, webspace, email) or sell it as ultra cheap internet access (as low as US$8.95/month in some areas).
While the quality varies from ISP to ISP, they are usually fairly reliable so long as your ISP has ordered enough lines.
No, dial-up was fine when it was the only kid on the block, but as long as non-proprietary, always on, broadband is available in my neck of the woods, they can drop the price of dial-up to $1 a month, and I'd still have to pass...
Well, maybe if I ever needed a traveling backup...
it's cool and nice to have sub-10 dollar ISPs, but unless I can use them *everywhere*, they are pretty useless to me.
/. a few hours before), but if it's not portable, what's the point of dialup?
case in point - ATT worldnet, despite being a fairly expensive option, allows me to dialup in most cities around the world. Which means that when I can get to a payphone in Japan with a data-port, I get internet. This is not so much a big deal now that I live here and have interent on my cellphone, but man does it save your life on business trips.
But - then we get back to it - when back in the US, the service comes in mighty handy.
so, i am all for cheaper service (I think ATT worldnet is more expensive than the 12Mbit fat-pipe advertised on
My life in the land of the rising sun.
None of the things touted in the article as problems with these services are an issue for most people.
No e-mail account - Well most people I know don't use the account of their provider, most have webmail accounts instead, because they can access them at university/work, and they can keep them if they move ISP.
No newsgroups - Well, usenet has become very unimportant to most people I know, and those that do use it (such as myself) will probably use Google-Groups instead.
No web space - Seriously, how many people are bothered about that? Yes, a lot of people might cobble together a quick web page, but it is still too complex for most. Besides with all the services providing free web space (even if it does have adverts) who needs space from their access provider.
Many people end up with all these things, which they are paying for but never use, because quite often the free services are better (and you don't lose them when you move ISP).
The only real negative points about these services is the dial up modem speed, but then for many, many people, that is plenty fast enough.
Looks to me like these services have worked out what it is that people really want, a connection to the internet at a price they can afford. There are enough free services on the web to make up for what is missing, so why pay for it.
Yes I know that having fast always on is nice (I'm on a 1meg cable connection) but for many who don't need to use the internet in the same way as I do, dial up is fine.
Paul
Paul Leader
I prepaid $54 for 6 months of Internet access from System Resource in Niagara Falls. They're a small operation - only serve a two-county area - but they're easy to set up, and they kinda-sorta support FreeBSD and Linux. (I can connect both from Linux and Windows.)
That, for the math-impaired Slashbots, is $9.00 a month. With no proprietary software (no software at all!). Take that, NetZero and your proprietary, ad-driven, Internet Exploder-based dialers!
I'm sure if you look, you'll find something similar in your own areas.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
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.
Dialup connections here in Finland have been free for years now, just use some public machine, in library etc. to order the service from ISP. Only sad thing we never got the free local calls system so we have to pay minute rate from the use which is something like $1/hour if I recall correctly.
Espically dial-up. I ran one back in the mid 90's and the 56K technology drove me to sell my customer base to a rival. non 56K dial-up is very easy to get running and maintain. if you can get users happy with 28.8 as a MAX then you can do it... espically cince T-1 connectivity is now cheaper at $690.00 per month for a 3 year lease PLUS your Backbone ISP fees... you're looking at around $900.00 a month for a cheap connection to support about 50 dial in modems. make that around 10 users per modem and you just might make it for that dial-in node.
if you HAVE to have 56K dial in lines then your modem costs just skyrocketed massively from $250.00 per modem to almost $700.00 per modem as well as your dial-in line costs. Making your operating costs basically double for that node.
I don't envy anyone in the dial-up biz anymore. customers calling to bitch about connection speed that dont understand why their wiring in their house or neighborhood is crap and causing part of it. and if you inch past the 10 users per modem you start getting complaints about busy signals.
undercutting to $4.95 sounds like a dot.bomb sales model. as that is making the margins too close for comfort.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why would you expect the same to happen in the UK or elsewhere? I consider it fair to pay for what I use. Use more -> pay more. Actually I think at least wireless (as in mobile phones) is going to cost per bit instead of the older per minute cost. This is in Finland, where I live. And yes, we had "free" phone calls outside office hours before the internet. Well, 10 cents per call, time not limited. Guess what happened?
People would call their ISPs every friday at 17:00, and then keep the connection open until monday morning 8:00 just in case they'd need it. This was hell for small ISPs (which were the cheaper ones). Sometimes it would take hours of trying and listening to a modem before getting a connection. Sure, this was back in '95-'97.
Now, I'm a happy ADSL user, but I can always go back to using the connection provided by a computer magazine I'm subscribed to. Yay, costs nothing extra (anymore). They even gad a super-cool BBS before the Internet Age.
Point anyway; it's sensible to pay per use, if the use is significant. Back in the old days the ISPs had far less lines than customers. I suppose this might still be the case.. Although digital data changes the picture; it will simply get slower for everyone. But, I'd like to pay per tv-program, because I don't watch TV much and I feel paying 50 cents a day (165$ 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.
Is the survival prospects of the company that important in this case?
Alright, it's a bit of a hassle if they shut down to go find a new one - but if you aren't using them for hosting your email or webspace, it's not such a disaster if the company only lasts a year before folding!
Like some other posters have already mentioned, we've had free ISPs in the UK for years. Since we pay for local calls, the ISP cut a deal that gives them a percentage of the amount we pay for calls.
Along came the deals where you could pay so much to BT a month to not pay for internet calls, and then you usually had to pay the ISP monthly too. They have made it simpler now (although you can still do it the old way), so you just pay the ISP for flat rate access.
The trouble is though, too often I've found the old "You get what you pay for" is very much true with ISPs. We used to pay £40 a month (£20 to Demon, £20 to BT) for our flat rate ISDN access [it'd be the same amount if we were on 56k, incidently], and the service, reliablilty and speed were fantastic. I've had a lot of people come complaining to me that BT (the ISP), Freeserve or whoever were appauling, but refuse to pay a bit more for a better service. Of course, lots of people can't afford it (we were lucky - ours was company paid for), but when looking at the cheap deals people need to realise they may have more problems connecting due to it being oversubscribed, the service may be slow, and support poor.
Then again, cheap bad internet is better than no internet, so it might bring connections to more homes.
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.
... if it weren't for this slow dialup 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...
It's only 5.95 a month. I don't have any interest in them, other than being a happy customer. It's nationwide, but I did find one place they didn't support with local dial up: the outer banks of NC. Access4less.net
AOL's customers are paying for the extra "content experience" that AOL provides, e.g. the whole environment when you log on, and are taken to the AOL-specific content.
:)
I don't think AOL will be overly concerned by these sort of operations, particularly if 20 (20%?) of them go bust a year. The typical AOL customer is willing to pay for the extras AOL provides on top of basic connection. If you use the UK as an example, with a number of free ISPs around, AOL still has one of the highest market shares. This may also have something to do with anti-competitive pricing and the like, but that's a rant for another day...
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
AOL's customers don't use AOL because of the price. They use AOL because it is AOL. Most are probably unaware that there are other ISPs. They are probably unaware that they are connected to the internet - just that they connect to AOL.
(Of course this doesn't apply to all AOL users so don't complain to me if you happen to be one)
There are several of these uber-cheap ISPs operating in my area. In fact, I have a neighbor who went with one particular one, which I was convinced was a bad idea. As it turns out, the service is reliable, decently quick (56k) and something like 12USD a month. Turns out though, one of the ways they cut costs is--no tech support. Whatsoever. If you need help, you have to call the fellow (it works like a reseller program, one guy resells for a national ISP) who set you up and hope he is clueful
As for cutting off the other things--webspace? It doesnt cost you anything until someone actually puts a website up. Of the thousands of customers we had when i worked at an ISP, only a bare handful of individuals, plus most of the business customers ever bothered to learn how to FTP (or "publish" if you're a frontpage person)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
This is hard to beat for low usage folks: http://www.access4free.com
- No ads
- works fine on Linux
- first 10 hours a month are free
- next 10 hours are $1/hour
- free again after that (max $10/month)
- no use, no charge
I setup my inlaws with a NIC (Larry Ellison's stepchild) and access4free for low-cost,low-maintenance access to email and IM.
The problem is that the line was plagiarized from the article, but out of context it makes no sense. The actual portion from the article reads:
"Another risk with budget ISPs is their reliability. Brandon Mullenberg, DialUpUSA president, says that about 20 of the startup ISPs that sign on with him annually shutter within a year."
Since I see no mention of how many ISP's sign up with him in a given year, it is a pretty useless fact. And even if they did tell us what percentage of these businesses were failing, who's to say they isn't just a bad business model?
And why did that guy get modded as a Troll?
MikeAtIF*ckStuffedAnimalsDotCom
We have it and it works for our international travelers. iPass also has US domestic service, but the pricing is about $5/hr, which is a bit steep for anything other than occasional use. Unless you have a huge number of users, you probably need an iPass reseller, such as Worldhook.
For those who need international dialup, there is no reason to be paying a monthly charge, because nobody offers flat-rate international service.
Free, for $1.50 an hour?
I know we have a lot of definitions of "free" on Slashdot, but ...
Like some other posters have already mentioned, we've had free ISPs in the UK for years. Since we pay for local calls, the ISP cut a deal that gives them a percentage of the amount we pay for calls.
Can even the most ardent US-basher parse that statement? ;)
Yes, we're so far behind Europe, where free things are paid for by the minute :)
...until the money grab happened. I was signed up with a local small ISP that provided excellent service for $9.95 a month. It came with POP3/SMTP/NNTP unlimited access and a static IP for running a server. I loved it. But after about two years, as their customer base grew, the service was harder to dial into. Then they expanded their modem pool (or PRI, not sure which) and the service was easy to dial into again. However, not long after that the customer service/support began to suck. They added a phone menu that made it harder to reach support and invariably got you to a clueless dork who couldn't trouble shoot a burnt lightbulb. Finally, after about 2.5 years, they merged with another ISP from a neighboring city that was growing. That ISP was soon bought out by a larger ISP in another state and BAM! the rates went from $9.95 a month to $21.95 a month. With no announcement. I just noticed that my debit card was getting more taken out of it per month after the big company took over. This big predatory company took over several of the smaller ISPs in my area that had been offering internet access at decent prices and jacked all of them up. Eventually, you either had to accept the $21.95 a month or do the ISP jig as new low cost ISPs came and went (every few months). I could afford the $21.95 a month but I did so grudgingly. Internet service shouldn't be expensive at all, especially now. The minute I could get DSL and actually get something worth what I paid for, I did. I am now a happy Speakeasy customer. :) Although I fear that they may fall victim to what my original inexpensive ISP back in 1995 did. They provide the least expensive DSL so far that is Linux friendly and allows you to run servers.
Just so folks know, the big bad ISP that took over my original ISP was CoreComm. In general, they REALLY blow. The last straw for me was when they took away my static IP without telling me. They also took the e-mail address I had since 1995 and "gave" it to someone else in their home city. Then they claimed that this person had the address all along which was complete bullshit. So... to anyone who works for CoreComm, I can't tell you how much your company sucks.
Un-news
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.
dialup is all I'm going to need.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
This is the result of customer confusion about how ISPs operate and what to expect from them. The same thing is going on in the hosting realm; people shop by price because they really don't understand the criteria by which they *should* be shopping.
And that's not always good. Imagine if you applied that same approach to, say hamburgers. Anyone could buy the crappiest rolls, the worst meat, add 50% filler with no condiments or cheese... you'd have a higher chance to get food poisoning, but hey! the burgers are only $0.25 each!