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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.
The only people who lose are the ones who were technicians working directly on the dialup infrastructure.
BT Openreach will still maintain the dial-up modems in the non-ADSL exchanges, of which there are 80+ in Scotland. So no real technical savings there.
Good idea, BT. Now, a good sequel to this would be to pull the plug on IPv4, and replace it all w/ IPv6
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.
No. There is no such thing as long distance charges, in the UK. It costs the same to call anyone anywhere in the country no matter where you are.
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.
There is a long tradition of backwards compatibility in the telephone network in the UK.
A phone made 100 years ago will still work. Unbalanced ringing and pulse dialling are all supported.
Short version:
Whereever they are in the UK they will pay the same charges to use the internet either paying a fixed subscription fee and then no phone call charges or paying by the minuite to their phone provider.
Long version:
The fact you use the term "long distance charges" makes me suspect you are an american. Things played out differently in the UK.
AIUI in the USA local calls were traditionally free, so if you found an ISP in your local call area then you paid no phone call charges. If your ISP was outside your local call area then you would pay "long distance charges" to connect to it in addition to whatever your ISP charged.
In the UK calls were traditionaly divided into "local", "regional" and "national". Local calls were cheapest (but not free), regional calls more expensive and national calls the most expensive. None were free.
When dialup ISPs first turned up in the UK they had only the occasional point of presense and it had a regular geographic number, so if you were outside of london you may well have had to pay national call rates to use them. This made internet access fairly expensive.
Then ISPs realised they could use 0845 numbers. At the time 0845 numbers cost the same as a local call regardless of where you were in the UK* and due to the crazy way regulatory structures were set up the reciving telco could actually make a profit off the call. At first ISPs just added 0845 lines as a feature and continued to charge subscription fees and/or per minuite charges of their own but later ISPs showed up where the only thing the customer had to pay was the 0845 call charges.
Arround this time there was also a short lived product called "surftime" from BT where the end user paid an additional charge on their phone line rental and in exchange got unmetered access (possiblly only at certain times of day) to special dialup phone numbers intended specially for use with the surftime package (though they could also be used by non-surftime users who would have to pay a per-minuite charge for the call)
Finally ISPs started offering "unmetered" packages where you pay a subscription to your ISP but you don't pay any phone call prices. From the end users point of view it looks like they are calling a freephone number and nothing appears on their phone bill but from the ISPs point of view there are special tarrifs for this service that are much cheaper than a regular freephone call.
Arround this time cheap (often unmetered) calling plans for phone calls to geographic numbers came in but 0845 calls were excluded from them and often the geographic numbers of ISPs were explicitly exlcuded too. So you couldn't really use them to access the internet.
Surftime basically died out (I can find any announcement saying it was no longer available to new customers, i've no idea if they ever got arround to killing it completely) so now for dialup in the UK you have basically two options. Either you use an ISP with no subscription fees and an 0845 number (and pay your telephone provider per minuite) or you use an ISP where you pay a subscription fee and then get free calls to the ISP.
* Since then the cost of calls to geograpic numbers has dropped through the floor while 0845 prices have remained much the same, so this is no longer the case.
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.
A phone made 100 years ago will still work. Unbalanced ringing and pulse dialling are all supported.
There's something appealing and slightly romantic about that