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."

Comments

How to simulate dialup

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: How to simulate dialup

[exxaminer]

Yeah...chess..:-)

Re:How to simulate dialup

[dryeo]

I'm stuck on 26.4-28.8 connections due to location. My son plays quite a few games on-line. As I'm his gateway I monitor the amount of traffic and often he is barely using 300 b/s. Minecraft is one example he plays a lot.

Re:How to simulate dialup

[FireFury03]

Apologies for posting as apparently anonymous coward (from the uk).... there are satellite alternatives who's prices have been getting more reasonable (no i don't work for a sat company), i do know someone that uses a home style service and they say it is good (they live on a canal boat). I monitor prices on the satellite stuff and it's getting much more reasonable especially if you were paying 17 quid for crap.... anyway might be worth a look for you... http://www.avonlinebroadband.co.uk/packages/

Lee

The problem with satellite broadband is the latency is very high, even compared to dialup (although the throughput can certainly be good), so whether its suitable depends on what you're using it for. Also, some of the satellite "internet" providers actually only provide access to the web, which is rather less useful.

Re:How to simulate dialup

[Altanar]

Exede user here. Here's my typical experience with my satellite connection:

• Minimum latency: 700 ms
• Download speed: Paying for 12 Mbps. Real speed: around 20 Mbps. Yes, actually faster than advertised. However, due to the built-in latency, websites feel a little slower to load.
• Upload speed: Paying for 3 Mbps. Real speed: Usually 1 Mbps. They obviously put low priority on uploads.
• Data cap: 15 GB/month. However, data is unmetered between 12 AM and 5 AM.
• Internet access Essentially unfiltered. Bittorrent is throttled. However, enabling protocol encryption bypasses the throttling.

My main issue with Exede is that it's DNS is flaky and sometimes requires me to cycle my network connection to fix. Even worse, it uses a proxy to hijack all port 53 DNS requests, so you can't choose an alternate server with the standard port. Netalyzr's log info on this:

UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) appears to pass through a firewall or proxy. The client was unable to transmit a non-DNS traffic on this UDP port, but was able to transmit a legitimate DNS request, suggesting that a proxy, NAT, or firewall intercepted and blocked the deliberately invalid request. A DNS proxy or firewall caused the client's direct DNS request to arrive from another IP address. Instead of your IP address, the request came from [Redacted]. A DNS proxy or firewall generated a new request rather than passing the client's request unmodified.

But other than that, it's still a *vast* improvement over the dial up I had for 15 years.

Re:How to simulate dialup

[darthdavid]

Minimum latency: 700 ms

[screams internally]

Re:Not bad at all

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

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.

Re:It's still easy to get dial-up

[jonbryce]

0845 numbers are special rate numbers and do generate some revenue in termination fees for the receiving telco. It probably isn't enough money for them to pass it on to a call centre or similar that uses the numbers, but when the telco uses the numbers themselves to provide an internet service, the numbers do stack up.

Re:Not bad at all

[petermgreen]

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.