Slashdot Mirror
BT Prepares To Pull Plug On Dial-Up
judgecorp writes "BT has proudly announced it will switch off its dial-up service on 1 September. But it turns out it isn't the end of the line for dial-up modems in the UK. BT charges £17.25 per month for dial-up, and broadband is only £10, so anyone who can switch across probably has by now. There are areas where broadband is not available, and BT reckons it still has 1000 dial-up customers who can't move to ADSL. For them, BT recommends a switch to Plusnet — an ISP which offers cheaper dial-up prices and is owned by .... BT."
Web designers who want to get a sense of what their web site feels like on dialup can download thttpd which supports bandwidth limiting; 5 kilobytes a second is a reasonable simulation of a dialup connection.
uh..that's bp, idiot.
This seems to be good news for everyone. BT gets to can a part of their business that is already made redundant by an owned property. They can allocate those resources somewhere else. The other telecom gets an increase of around 1000 subscribers increasing revenue for them. For some reason the crazy individuals who were paying more for the same service are now being informed that they should pay this other company less for the same service. The only people who lose are the ones who were technicians working directly on the dialup infrastructure. Hopefully they were doing both and keep their jobs.
http://www.uklinux.net/ do dial-up
I had to go check FTA to see what the date on it was -- the 30th.
So BT is really only giving people 2 days notice that it's ending their Internet service?
No way! Slashdot still covers us/uk in the same level (above anyone else)
Tomorrow is another day...
Dial-what?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Good idea, BT. Now, a good sequel to this would be to pull the plug on IPv4, and replace it all w/ IPv6
That is called "subtlety".
I'm finding that I'm not learning any more from the Internet now than the Internet of 13 years ago.
There's a lot more shiny and noise, and web pages which used to be optimised for efficient downloading are now optimised for nothing at all.
It's like comparing Windows NT 4 with 8, or Adobe Reader 3 with XI: the functionality that most people need to get work done has been there for a very long time.
My brother is an old BT customer (in both senses). He has had a BT email account since Adam was a lad, and a broadband account since broadband became available on his street (getting on for 10 years).
He just forwarded an email to me which purported to come from BT offering to "connect his email address to his broadband account", Click Here to keep your email address. It looked very very real, but the link targets did not correspond to the text.
It is possible his email account was marked as dial-up because of how long it has existed with no changes that would have recreated it - but still, the links aren't right. So I said "PHISHING" and told him to forward the headers to abuse@bt.com.
It's getting more and more difficult to tell phishing from real messages that are just incompetently designed.
Postscript: I forwarded the email to abuse@bt.com - where it bounced. Way to go, BT - advertise an address that doesn't work. Perhaps you are too busy letting the NSA burrow into the Transatlantic Cable.http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/02/telecoms-bt-vodafone-cables-gchq
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
There are dial-up providers out there which don't even ask that you sign-up, they just provide a phone-number+username+password for anyone to use.
(What's in it for them, I don't know. 0845 numbers don't generate revenue for the callee.)
What BT are shutting down is, from what I can gather, their unlimited dial-up service (i.e. a username/password on a dial-up service at a free-to-call number). Whether there are any of those still out there, I'm not sure. Google didn't turn up anything interesting.
http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/packages
Doesn't include line rental which is another £15.45 per month and only gives you 10GB of data. Line rental is extra for the dial-up package as well. In terms of units better understood by the general public, that is about 8 hours of BBC iPlayer per month.
Plusnet is owned by BT, but is run as an independent company with its own customer services department in Sheffield, England, which is much better than BT's customer service department in India.
and only gives you 10GB of data. Line rental is extra for the dial-up package as well. In terms of units better understood by the general public, that is about 8 hours of BBC iPlayer per month.
Not sure how you did that calculation. iPlayer HD is 3.6-4Mb/s, which works out at around 5-8 hours for 10GB. Standard definition content is 0.7Mb/s, which works out at just under 32 hours in 10GB.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
flashhd works out at about 1.2GB per hour, so you can get 8h 20m in 10GB. But then you need to take away the data used in loading up the pages to decide what to watch etc.
flashvhigh works out at about 600MB per hour, so you get twice the length of video vs high definition.
To get one of the other formats, you need to be using something other than a desktop computer.
Plusnet is owned by BT, but is run as an independent company with its own customer services department in Sheffield, England, which is much better than BT's customer service department in India.
Wonder why BT didn't just "sell" their customers and DDIs to Plusnet instead of instructing people to migrate.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Well it means they have decided that dialup is no longer important enough to handle as part of their main buisness. So they have pushed off the responsibility of handling those customers unlucky enough to be stuck on dialup to a relatively small subsidary.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
AT&T still offers good dial up here in the states for $22/month. Free if you are a uverse customer.
http://att.prodigy.net/openPhone/index.html
I keep a little usb modem in my laptop bag for those "when all else fails" times. Its slow but its better then nothing.
I have to return some videotapes...
Anything big that one would send over the wire, such as zipfiles, image files, audio files, and application installers, is already compressed. Modems won't increase compression.
I have a friend in the UK who in turn has a friend that works for Virgin. He gets "mates rates" around 40 pounds a month, two smart phones (a blackberry and a samsung andriod) unlimited calling, messaging etc anywhere in the UK, cable his house (with pretty much all channels but porn), VOIP home phone and I think it is around a 30Mbps internet connection. All this for about half what I pay for my 150Mbps connection. Pretty sweet. But even normal people get things a lot cheaper in the UK for this kind of stuff. 15-20 pounds a month is pretty typical for a cell phone from what I've heard.
Before Wikipedia, there were the "factual nodes" on Everything2. I used to be a noder there until I moved to Wikipedia.