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BT Prepares To Pull Plug On Dial-Up

Posted by timothy on from the for-soothing-modem-noise-press-1 dept.

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."

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re: How to simulate dialup by exxaminer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah...chess..:-)

  2. Re:How to simulate dialup by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    http://blog.nexusuk.org
  3. Re:How to simulate dialup by Altanar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:How to simulate dialup by darthdavid · · Score: 5, Funny

    Minimum latency: 700 ms

    [screams internally]