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European Internet Users boycott telecom June 6
troc sent us the the British strike site for this weekend's European Internet Users Telecommunications boycott. The boycott is over having to pay metered internet phone bills, which quite frankly, seems almost as silly as US crypto laws. There is also a site for the EU as well.
Actually I think that pay by the minute local calls is a good idea.
I think it is fair that a house that hardly uses a phone pays less than a house that uses a phone many hours a day.
With more and more ISPs going free in the UK the price difference isn't that great between UK and the US anyway.
Cable Modems are being rolled out in the UK over the
next 18 months.
Not all areas have cable access however.
I am lucky. I will have cable modem here in Sept.
There are a few companies offering wireless type links to the net, generally they are billing people by usage [ie bytes transferred] and are currently limited to some rather small geographic areas. The government has no part in how the connection is classified [except that it needs to use a licence exempt frequency - usually the 2.4 GHz band] they simply collect VAT that gets added onto the price. The only real problem with wireless access over here is that you need radio masts everywhere to get around all the hills.
As for cable access and/or ADSL it is just beginning to appear in a slightly more solid form than the Beta tests that have been going on for ages, my local cableco has been promising cable modems for several years now with no sign of them showing up although NTL are now rolling them out.
They'll get there eventually I guess.
I agree entirely. More than one pricing plan would certainly benefit the end user. You could have a
system in which metered is the default, and suits a lot of people, but a (fairly high) flat-rate charge is
also available which would suit people who want to make heavy use of the network.
Unmetered options do exist in the UK, usually they're aimed at businesses but they are there. Take a peek at Featureline from BT sometime - that'll give you a point to point phone line for around 40 quid per month, or ask your local cableco about Centrex. Of course this relies on having a friendly ISP willing to use such services instead of a monolithic ISP merrily collecting Revenue from it's wonderful linkline 0345 number.
Our infrastructures state of the art, but we've got £4 billion (approx $6-7 billion) profits to safeguard.
We are getting there, slowly; for example, there are one or two ISPs who actually offer unmetered access. Screaming.net (http://www.screaming.net) springs to mind, but, as always, there's a catch; you have to switch phone companies to Localtel, a branch of BT. Good while it lasts, but not only does switching back involve considerable costs, but BT use wire rather than cable connections. Many cable TV deals here provide cable phone lines, and it isn't really worth giving up the chance of a cable modem (all the cable hardware is there) for a few short term savings. (Unless you're like me, and too poor to afford a cable modem - but all this is purely theoretical anyway
As for the "free" ISPs, they just detract from the wider issue. I would rather pay a fixed monthly ISP fee with unmetered calls, than join a free ISP and receive a monumental bill at the end of the month. No doubt they're fine for people who are new to the internet, or not terribly interested in heavy use, but for the rest of us they're more deleterious than beneficial. Free ISPs are a false economy - initially, many will see it as a fantastic deal, until they realise exactly where the bulk of their money is going.
Sure... just wasn't it that here in Italy a 64k leased line (which is all but fast!) costs like 10.000 dollars a year...
Actually, phone companies charge hundreds of time than they spend on infrastructural costs. That's life... when the governments don't care about you but just about their personal advantages
(not that they don't do that in the f****g US)
I've heard that more than 40% of the traffic to or from an average european isp is for the US. A lot of the content is in the US. So naturally, IP traffic will be more expensive in Europe, as the ISPs have to pay for expensive trans-atlantic cables.
The really stupid thing is that trans-atlantic traffic can be cheaper still than a leased line from one european country to another. So intra-european ip traffic often go through the US, back and forth over the atlantic.
Europe needs to build its own real internet infrastructure, not just hook up to the US' internet infrastructrue.
I moved to Germany back in 94 as the Govt. controlled phone company was beginning to privatise.. we pay per minute for phone connection, with rates varying by time of day(approx. 4 DM per hour usually).. I run approx. 300DM(about $170-200) a month in phone bills, but those bills seem to have paid for decent infastructure... you can get ISDN amost anywhere here for 40DM a month, and always get a solid 50K dialup connection to my ISP when I am using a modem.. this is compared with the US where if you are not in a major city the phone companies have done very little to outlying phone systems in the past 40 years and you are incredibly lucky to get a 26400 connection.. Now that I am done rambling I will come back to my original point and say per-minute costs are good as long as they support the infrastructre of the phone system!!!!!!!!!!
This is ofcourse bullshit... why would a state-owned monopoly telecom company without profit requirement operate so much more cost-effective than 5 companies trying to get to the same market and flooding the media with expensive commercials?
He he, "can't be far behind the US".
BT probably have the best equipment in the world. The reason it's so expensive is that BT are an evil monopoly (YES they are BofTel!).
The thing is, it costs BT 0.0001 p a minute (or however little it is) for the actual connection. We're paying the extra for ET and all the other stupid adverts and convoys of BT vans.
They're doing it, at this particular date, because of the boycott in my opinion.
The Netherlands have the most cables/meter (including cable tv, telephone). Almost all cables to and from telco KPN are fiber and everything except multiplexer home is fiber too.
I can't help but think that this is all an exercise in barking up the wrong tree. When you do the sums you soon realise that unmetered internet access is basically just heavy users asking to be subsidised by regular users.
Think of the costs: the 'local' call is only local in terms of billing, its the ISP which has to pay for that. The way the ISP does that is to bill you higher monthly charges or per minute.
The telco recovers its costs at the same time through higher monthly charges. I currently pay less for my line in the UK than a US user does for a service with *metered* local calls (£4.75 vs $8), and much less than a unmetered service of course.
The trick lies in wether you make this universal or not. If you make it universal (as being called for), low traffic users will be subsidising high traffic ones. Is this fair? I think not.
Ok. By why do I say "barking up the wrong tree". Basically, high traffic users are probably close to outliving the analog connection method as it is. They want the higher bandwith of cable modems etc. and here metering of the connection is no longer the issue.
Cable modems are almost myths! There was a trial in Manchester which lasted about a year. It should only have lasted for 6 months tops but they forgot about them :-/
Then they were withdrawn and the release date just keeps getting put back further and further!
Metered service has a huge impact on many things.
The number one thing it has an impact on is profits and this is why the European boycott will amount to nothing. It will be but a blip on the telecom's radar screens, soon forgotten as users remember just how indispensible the internet is. The finical planning sections at various European telcos probably already have the boycott figured into their spreadsheets. The really astute will look for slight stock market movements in service and manufacturing industries tied to telcos or mergers/acqusitions that use the FUD and/or the finical cover "noise" created by the boycott
Now, for my "why metered is bad" rant.
Metered service slows the growth and acceptance of internet, which is eventual anyway... so why resist?
Metered service limits the resources and development of industry within a country or region. Excess capacity == economic advantage.
Metered service causes telcos to under engineer their network due artifical economic limitations placed upon demand. When compaired to call completion statistic for unmetered service area with similar demographics, metered networks wither and fail miserably under the load.
Metered service make monopolitic, state run telcos panicky when they are faced with the eventual prospect of losing total control of their market. This often causes wild, reactionary policy changes that actually cost jobs and money in the long run.
Metered phone service, due to state enforcment of telco monopolies, is easier to monitor. One carrier, one bill, one line, one customer, one Big Brother.
Metered phone service fails to keep pace with consumer demand or technlogical advances. America consumer choise: Analog, ISDN, ASDL, Cable, MMDS, LMDS, Satellite, unlicense spectrum wirless. European consumer choice: Analog, ISDN and cable, if you're lucky.
Now, with all that said, the citizens of the various European countries should boycott metered service completely, but moving to non-telco internet access technologies (for the local loop at least). This is the ONLY way to get the telco's attention.
All the American users gloating over their flat rate access, your day is comming. The telcos in the US are in the process of collapsing your local service area by expanding number of area codes. Soon enough, US telephone consumers will find that it's a metered call to dial anywhere outside the central office to which your local loop is terminated. In addtion, the only reason that cable service has expanded as quickly as it has is due to AT&T's desire to restore it's universal service to the last mile.
All the fsck-heads who keep talking about the eventual cost of telephone/internet service approaching zero need to stop free-basing their cocaine.
Them's the fact and the facts ain't pretty.
Unless it's a French goverment.
It's not giving it away. The phone co offers unlimited usage at a higher flat rate.
And I disagree - the American government regulated unlimited local calls when it split up ATT into the baby bells.
Same think here. From all the poeple I know, there
one who probably connects to the Net for less than 20 hours per month.
For more information, see the (biased but informative) picture at The Campaign for Unmetered Telecoms.
The arguement is inherintly flawed.
You don't _call_ transatlantic when you go to some US website or server. You use either some buried OC-48 or a sattelite linkup. And no matter what BS the local telco feeds you, those methods are cheap when you consider how many users are on, how much data is sent, and how much those services charge ISPs and NAPs, along with the myriad of other services phone companies offer.
This idea of metered phone calls is just a sham to take more money from the consumer.
Free ISPs came out in England first for a very good reason: access cost to much in that area, and someone finally realized a good way to make money and get more customers. ISPs are trying to make up for lost (additional) profits by sticking it to the consumer in a more creative fashion.
Not that I am complaining. I am American, and this metered calling plan means more jobs for Americans, since British internet access is going to get even _more_ expensive for the consumer: metered calling means that Joe Average isn't going to get access, which means that less internet commerce of all types comes out of england, which means that more services that offer assorted online commerce will move elsewhere. I just think its stupid for a country's industry to shoot itself in the foot in such a way.
BT is proud of the fact that it is the only national telecoms carrier in the world with 100% digital exchanges'
...which is by the way wrong. Germany is 100% digital since end of 1997.
The technology in Europe is often far more superiour than in US, because it is usually much newer and because this on a higher technical standard.
:-)
But on the other hand technology is often more expensive in Europe, and sometimes not so feature-rich or user friendly, or the good features are much more expensive.
This may sound like a miracle to US citizens, maybe you must be an European to understand this
>That'd be nice -- problem is, as long as you're
>using a modem and a normal phone line (or indeed
>ISDN... ) you're being given a dedicated,
>switched connection to the remote modem, which
>is yours for the duration of the call, whether
>you're sending data or not. If you're only using
>it for IRC, that does not mean the rest of that
>bandwidth is available for someone else.
Bandwith != Ports, and n given as the Number of Ports: Total-Bandwith != n * Single-Port-Maximum-Bandwith.
Yes, you are using your own dedicated port, but usually have not your own dedicated bandwidth, but the total bandwidth is shared between the ports, and is in total not the sum of all possible bandwiths on all ports. It is not unusual to have, say 90 ISDN-Ports with each 64 kBit, which sum up to 6 MegaBit fed by a single 2 MegaBit or even lesser Bandwith Line. At least here in Germany this is normal, as Bandwith is still quite expensive.
If the phone calls to the ISP are free, the number of ports are expected to get a problem, as you need more ports. But there is one difference to the bandwidth problem: Adding a port is a onetime cost, which may possible be charged to the consumer.
And this is the reason why a said, that merging the ISP and the telco in one company might solve the problem. Using a dedicated port in your local phone exchange should be much less cost than using a dedicated line from your home, over the exchange till the ISP...
But i still believe, that ISP and Telco in one company is a very bad idea, as this will destroy the other not telco-owned ISPs.
I live in Germany, where i have quite expensive internet costs. The problem with internet is, that the current billing model is not exactly covering the costs i create.
I think the phone call to the ISP should be free, and instead the traffic should be billed. The problem is, if im online for hours and do only low-traffic irc, im paying for these people who are online over a short period but are downloading Megs and Gigs of Data. And this is definitively unfair. I have to pay for all these persons who think that they need to download Episode 1 or other big files. For your knowledge: Episode 1 is worth about $40 to $100 of internet traffic, at least at the current prices in germany.
But the big problem in billing the traffic and giving the connection for free, is that the ISP and the telco are usually not the same company, and the telco wants the money for the actual connection i make.
If the telco and the isp would be the same company, i would only need a connection just to my local phone exchange, and the data would be flow as ip - and billed as traffic - beginning there.
So the only way to free internet phone calls would be to merge the isp and the telco in one company, but im afraid this would also be the worst move, because in Europe and specially in Germany we have only very few telcos, and most telcos dominate their local area, so this way they would monopolize the internet access, which may be bad regarding the prices.
Posted by Forlife:
..speed freaks..the internet should be enjoyed,not rushed...
Good for you, its about time some of the EU countries stood up for them selves.
Why only a weekend, hit them where it hurts in the back pocket; make it at least a week to get the point across.
Per minute charge, what do they think you are
I'm online 24 hours a day, and I pay zippo...
I think some governments dont get that by limiting the peoples access to the world it's like limiting a child's fundamental right for a semi-decent education while in his or her prime of learning.
Show them who is in Control
Metering voice calls makes sense -- a switched system like the phones means that a circuit is in place and taking up resources even when no data is transmitted. Before modems, people had no reason not to hang up, the US telcos were OK making local calls free, but if everyone left their modem connected 24/7, the phone system would soon run out of switches.
Now I get a pretty hefty phone bill for my Internet calls, so on a personal level, I'm eager to get a fixed monthly rate arrangement in place ASAP -- but I'm not sure free phone calls is the right way. After all, modems are crap (bad handshake times, bad latency), and the infrastructure is sure to be more expensive in the long run -- if everyone left their modem connected 24/7, it would effectively be the same as everyone having a leased line direct to their ISP. Why have a switched connection for each customer, when all they want is a packet-driven network?
I'm scared that free local phone calls will stunt demand for *proper* home networking -- I don't care how the IP packets get where they're going, I just want an ethernet port somewhere in my house. The sooner nobody uses modems, the better. They suck.
--
The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how
many minutes you stay on the phone.
Variable costs for the telephone company are determined by peak usage. They have to buy
enough switch capacity and interoffice trunk lines to provide a specified quality of service during
peak usage periods. Off-peak usage of the telephone system doesn't add to the cost of providing
service.
You don't need a degree in maths to see that since Internet calls are usually longer than voice calls (on an unmetered service), more internet calls means higher peak usages. On an unmetered service, though, the cost of meeting these peak demands gets passed on to the voice-only customers as well as the net users who are hogging the capacity -- pretty unfair.
Kithran wrote: Well as I understand it local calls are unmetered in the US and the big question is why shouldn't they
also be unmetered in the UK (and the rest of Europe).
When the US Telcos introduced free local calls, voice calls was all there was -- and people didn't have any reason to leave a call connected for hours on end.
I'll bet US telcos would love to go back to metered pricing now, but since the consumer is now so used to free calls, it ain't gonna happen.
--
"It must be true, I read it on the internet"
This is complete and utter bull...we have several European backbone(provider)s, which we route through, and most countries have established a national IP traffic exchange (DIX in Denmark, LINX in London, AMS-IX in The Netherlands, and so forth)
My statistics for the last 24 hours show that of the top 10 Autonomous systems we have exchanged traffic with, only one is US based, so please get your facts straight, we have, a telephone/IP infrastructure, which is at least as good as in US, if not better.
-- Andreas
Witness the difference between mobile and regular telephony. Mobile telephony is a fairly recent development here in Europe. As such, the former state companies are more or less in the same position as the newcomers. Here in the Netherlands, there are probably ten mobile phone companies, making it a reasonably effective market. For regular telephony, as a private citizen there is effectively still no other choice than the former state company. (And, as the state company is quite wealthy, it can afford to make a loss on services like mobile telephony in order to put competitors out of business. The regulatory body ( OPTA) is putting a stop to some unfair practices and prices, but we're still a long way from a fully liberalised phone market.
A reasonably popular alternative infrastructure for internet access and voice is cable, but it's not available yet in many places (because it needs to be rewired for twoway connections), and the cable companies are often cluefully challenged.
there hase been one boycot of ST alredy - blocking of it's customers from a lot of web content. on first days ST just made some cracking/hacking (outside proxies, anonymizers, even attacks against web sites) - it shows they do not understand and they do not want understand nor solve problems they cause. and after all, no consenzus has been made with us.
so there is petition organized to make a referendum to cut the law which guarantee them monopoly. for those of you from slovak republic ... viac informacii + peticne harky najdete na http://www.sis.sk/Referendum/.
hany
when i was in France i had sometimes 400$/month only for internet connection, i've decided to emigrate in Québec, now my local phone calls are free :o), but i pay 50% taxes on my salary :-(
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
OTOH I also like the non-metered ADSL-speed internet I have.
The point being that instead of enforcing metering or not-metering there should be an option of both.
--
Pirkka
What pushed our prices down was a healthy competition that started about a decade ago.
But still it's hard to get non-metered calls here. That's simply because there has been no demand for that kind of service until recently (and telcos are sloooow).
The interesting thing is that not long ago US had the most powerful telco monopoly on this planet (the System, among friends) and boy did they suffer because of that.
--
Pirkka
You get nothing for nothing; even if you get free calls, you'll still be paying more for line rental.
--
--
This is not a matter of technical advancement. Actually, in my country (france) the whole phone network has been digital for about 4 years.
The trouble is that most european countries have had a single state-owned telco for years.
Even now, the benefits of competition are only visible for companies or people who make long distance calls. Practically the whole local loop in France is owned by France Telecom, and I bet that with the Internet boom local calls are more than ever one of their cash cows, and they certainly don't want to make them free.
Even if they did, there's the problem of regulation authorities, as someone already said here, who prevent a dominant telco to make too aggressive moves that could hurt competition in the long run.
It seems to me that the only hope for cheap broadband and unmetered Internet access in Europe is Radio LANs. Unfortunately, most interesting frequency ranges are forbidden and reserved for military usage...
Well, mainly because until a short time ago all phone companies in Europe were state-owned and had a national monopoly.
So they didn't have to be cost-efficient, and could request from the government that calls within the local-loops were also charged per-minute.
Now the situation is changing slowly, but very few countries in Europe have a serious competitor for home phone lines to the former state-owned company.
Maybe in a few years the governments will mandate free local-loop calls, but only when their stakes in the phone companies have been reduced further so they won't feel the decline in income from the profits of those companies.
Of course it would be a popular move, so I can imagine that some governments will be tempted, especially when they come in a sitatuation in which their popularity is declining.
Erwin
In Europe you pay a monthly fee. This fee is for the connection you have to your local phone exchange.
The problem isn't calls withing the same phone exchange; there should be enough bandwidth within the exchange to connection every single phone line in the local loop *somewhere*.
If an exchange doesn't have enough bandwidth for that, that's a design error. You're paying for it in your monthly bill!
(Other things like dialing circuits used to be limited, but on a digital system this isn't much of a problem either; anyway with an Internet-call you'll only spend a tiny fraction of the time dialing)
The long-distance connections between the exchanges are the problem, they have limited bandwidth.
But the local exchange should be able to connection any local line line to any other local line for 24 hours a day, and it's already included in the monthly fee.
Your theory doesn't seem to hold; many providers in Europe do or did charge for the traffic, and while it did reduce traffic (I can tell, I've worked for companies with such connections) but it hasn't increased bandwidth.
And it does reduce innovative use of the Internet and the economic growth that comes with it.
In the United States, Internet metering has a very rare occurrence to my knowledge, and there are vastly bigger Internet connections than in Europe (the equivalent of a T3 in Europe is out of the question except for the biggest companies)
For providers, there is an incentive to keep increasing bandwidth when customers pay a flat fee: more bandwidth keeps more happy customers.
And the extra income generated by a new customer (startup fees, additional services, website design) is a lot bigger than the extra revenue from a metered service (and since most companies don't want to pay more for Internet than a certain sum, there's not likely to be much extra revenue).
You seem to have serious reading-and-comprehension problems, pal.
I was saying that they were less cost-effective.
Not that I expected any better reading skills with your use of language.
Power grids in Europe generally are more robust, as most countries have decent national power grids which do a pretty good job of distributing power where it's needed and spreading the load when one part of the network goes down - very few areas, at least, those with major populations, are fed by only one grid line. This makes for more robustness when power stations go offline or the lines come down, to the extent that major blackouts are very rare in Europe. It's kind of like internetworking, really - diverse connections and routing make for more robust networks. However, the topic digresses...
Dunno if I could last a whole week without checking email ;)
..
.. so altho local calls are free after 6pm, a call to your ISP costs you money... tightwads :/
Personally, I'm moving to the U.S. anyway to marry my fiancee so I guess then I'll be able to enjoy free internet access as well
Even so, I'd love to see the U.K. get free local calls.. really crap without it.
Diamond Cable in Leicester (where I live currently) DID have free local calls, but THEN started charging for ISP calls
Delphis
The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how many minutes you stay on the phone.
Variable costs for the telephone company are determined by peak usage. They have to buy enough switch capacity and interoffice trunk lines to provide a specified quality of service during peak usage periods. Off-peak usage of the telephone system doesn't add to the cost of providing service.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
From my experience, the phone infrastructures in France are as modern, maybe more, than those in the US.
The current problem is the following: there used to be a state monopoly on all communications (now called France Telecom). This monopoly has been suppressed for long-distance calls (by simply pressing 7 instead of 0 in front of a long-distance call, you select Cegetel for instance). On the other hand, it will take a few years before concurrence for local calls.
In the meantime, France Telecom is prohibited by concurrence authorities from breaking down the prices for local calls, for instance by proposing unmetered local calls. The reason is that other operators, newcomers to the marketplace, wouldn't be able to propose at first so interesting pricings.
A recent decision said that, in the end, it could sale "batches" of 20 hours a month of local calls, for Internet use especially. The forecasts are that it makes France, which used to be one of the most expensive European countries for Net access, one of the cheapest.
Unsaid assumption: for any country X different from the US, from any kind of infrastructure Y, Y in X is of course more primitive than Y in US.
:-)
My own experience is that the power grid in the US seems to be more prone to problems that the one in Europe. I've never heard of entire French cities, with whole suburbs, put into the dark by an accident, while it happens regularly in the US, including in the high-teach areas of the San Francisco bay.
Why should internet calls be free? If you want unmetered access, get a leased line or get a cable connection or some other connection that's _designed_ to be connected 24/7. Your call uses infrastructure designed for phone calls of a limited length with only a small percentage of people involved in a call at any one time.
Why should the phone companies give you something for free that costs them money by the minute???
My Journal
Europeans and Brits are not being charged for -bandwidth- they're being charged -per minute-. This means they get charged the same to connect to the net at 56.6 (or as close as they can get) and continuously download .tgz files for an hour as they do to connect to the net at, say, 9600, and chat on IRC or ICQ or play a mud or mush or even read slashdot (with images off, of course.)
Per minute charges do not have that great an affect on bandwidth usage - people will connect just long enough to download the big file they want and then disconnect again. What per minute charges do is make it ridiculously expensive to do anything interesting or informative on the net. If it takes you five minutes to read an online article, that's five minutes you payed for while using -no- bandwidth. (unless you're doing a download in a background process).
And personally, I find it frustrating when a British friend tells me they can only stay connected and chat for twenty minutes because they have to conserve time to keep their phone bill down. I can imagine that those in that situation are much, much, much more frustrated.
So, re-think your position, and try to address the actual issue.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
I should think that 2 big factors cause US networks to have more reliability problems than Europe's:
1) US networks were built earlier, as a result of a heavy-handed government push for rich-guy subsidized access for poor guys
2) US networks are more spread out geographically, because the US has a lower population density. Thus, there are more vulnerable points.
Why is it so expensive over there in Europe ?
I mean, the infrastructure can't be that far behind US.
As you say, media publicity is the REAL objective.
Also if politicians can become involved etc.
The sooner the local loop is "unbundled" from BT`s monopoly the better. A communal local loop has been proposed.
A member of CUT - Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
Yes Kingston still do unmetered calls, but only to their own ISP Karoo Extra. It costs £40 per month for unmetered calls OR £15 per month plus 6p per call (no matter the length).
Kingston is owned and run by Hull county council and is about to float on the market.
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
Sorry - but US long distance and indeed international calls are significantly cheaper than British Telecom national & international calls.
Also it is often the case that Telco`s in the US are either solely a local provider or a national provider. THe Telco`s that operate as a local provider owns the local loop and are all profitable by charging either low rental + metered charges or a higher flat-rate fee for unmetered local calls.
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
I'm surprised that so many people in Europe are still using telephone lines. Isn't the European Infrastructure superior to the United States? I would image everyone there had xDSL or ISDN or Cable.
This is because the European Telco`s were/are state owned and generally have large monopolies in their own countries = no competition = no need to introduce DSL ect since their customers have no where else to go...per minute charges=lots of profit for their shareholders
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
Just to let you know -
CUT the UK organisers has already stated that any loss of profits will be unverifiable and therefore irrelevant to the boycott. Tee real objective is media and political coverage and awareness.
In the UK it has been covered by all the computer magazines (PC Format, Amiga Format, Computer Shopper, Wired, PCW etc etc) by internet sites (SlashDot, CNet, ZDNet, BBC Online etc etc) by radio and TT and also the NewSPapers....with more to come tomorrow and monday
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
It's actually pretty bad here in denmark, and I can understand those that participate although I don't think it'll lead anywhere.
:)
When I used dialup a couple of years ago (thank God for leased lines), I had phonebills at about $1150 for 3 months. Ok I did use inet quite alot
Resistance is not futile - www.gnu.org
Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and scarce resources should be charged, to moderate demand.
If everyone paid per byte for their internet access there would be almost no lag, because people would be more careful about their usage.
And ISPs would have a direct incentive to provide better service, because being able to pass more traffic would immediately generate revenue.
Don't be under the illusion that if we had unmetered phone calls in Europe, the telecoms companies would collect less revenue: it would just be collected in fixed charge not in call charges. The question of reducing telecoms' profits is entirely orthogonal to the question of whether the charge is a fixed one or a metered one.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Basically internet provision does cost more in the UK than in the US - mostly because 90% of access involves going off to the US (directly or indirectly). UK internet companies pay for all these expensive transatlantic links to the US (US providers need far less international transit, and anyhow they can normally freeload on their peers). So there is a higher cost involved with UK connectivity which can only be resolved by having very cheap transatlantic or not needing transatlantic (one requires reducating the transatlantic carriers, the other means that all the required content has to be locally available).
As UK connectivity costs more, and specifically has close to a per-byte aspect to it due to the non-UK traffic, the charging has to be different. Currently there are 3 ways of getting people to pay for internet:-
1. Monthly fees
2. Per second phone charges (the ISP gets a cut)
3. Sell advertising
Most ISPs use a combination with varying degrees of each. If you go to unmetered local calls then all this has to be paid for somewhere, so it will either be larger monthly fees (probably with usage limits) or enforced advertising - which often means that linux is not just unsupported but strongly discriminated against (because you clever linux users work round the advertising presentation).
The UK is not the same as the US, so don't just assume US solutions will work there, and don't just think that someone else will pay for it - you need a fair and consistant charging model. I'm not saying the current one is that, but to succeed a replacement must both be reasonable for users and allow the ISPs to stay in business.
Kingston were particularly miffed about this because the Demon PoP being called (this was in the days before single number access) was outside Kingston's network, so they were being charged huge amounts by BT and getting nothing back from their customers.
I can't remember how this was resolved, now - whether Kingston put a limit on call length, exempted the PoP number, or whether Demon simply set up a PoP inside Kingston's network.
Does anybody know if Kingston still do free local calls? Or indeed whether the 0845 numbers Demon provide now are exempt from such a rate? (they're not local numbers, after all)
--
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
My phone and modem are going to be yanked out of the wall on Sunday, and will be plugged back in on Monday morning. I just hope that my parents don't try to call me and then get all panicky when they get a "disconnected" tone :-)
I actually doubt that this strike will do much good, but hey, it's the principle of the thing, isn't it :-) I hope that the strike generates some mainstream news in Monday's papers. Media publicity is more likely to get us noticed than the strike itself.
Yes there are a number of 'free' ISPs in the UK and the number of subscribers are rapidly increasing. (Indeed I think Freeserve now have more users than AOL in the UK). There is still a big price differential between the UK & the US with regards to the cost of internet access.
These 'free' ISPs in the UK are just no mothly fee - you still pay for the phone call to connect (indeed that is how these ISPs are funded they and the teleco split the revenue from calls). Given the fact the cheapest phone calls you are likely to find will be 1 pence per minute the bills soon mount up.
I'm lucky enough to be with a teleco who provides unmetered calls to other customers of the same teleco - including my ISP and I pay 12 pounds a month for my net access. With a 'free' ISP that would equate to 20 hours a month. While that would be enough for light use (say email and a little casual surfing) as soon as you start making large downloads or spending more time online the savings with the unmetered model get more and more pronounced.
I'd be interested to know what sort of percentage of US internet users are online for less than 20 hours a month....
Kithran
BTInternet are allowing free calls for subscription paying customers, but only on the weekends, so I'm still boycotting this Sunday
Goto BTInternet for more info....
~ Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity ~
No but they all have to buy their connectivity from the former monopolist; only a few have a few wires of their own. And hardly any of these wires cover the "Last Mile" into your home. So no matter where and what you call, you have to go through a monopolist's line for which a per minute charge applies. The margins those competitive carriers get in the end are miniscule, evidenced by the fact that long-distance calls are almost getting cheaper than local calls.
As long as the former monopolies hang on to the local phone lines, I don't see anything happen.
As far as this strike is concerned, there was one in Germany last November. The only thing I remember was people saying that the internet was never faster than on that day.
You can (at least in my area of SE Texas) can opt for Metered or Basic Service with SW Bell. Metered means a basic charge per "unit" and you get so many units per month included. For a little more, you can get basic service which is 100% unlimited local calling.
Sprint, which controls a small region of the SE Texas area, has only Metered Unit service (Last time I checked ~9 months ago).
So, It is here.
RB
Metered telephone calls aren't just expensive in Europe. Most of Asia also has metered calls. Even worse, in a lot of countries, the telco is owned by the government. I have to pay $1US/hour for using the line. Fortunatly, there is a local PBX where I live. So I use the PBX for Internet cals, and it's all free. But I still have to pay by the minute on my direct line. I just feel sorry for the poor chumps who don't have the advantage of a PBX.
But it makes sense, especially in poorer countries with old infrastructure. The telephone networks of the world were designed for calls which should last no more than 30 minutes. But Internet connections use the lines for hours at a time. And you guys in the States and Canada keep your telephone lines busy for months (i know i used to). This puts a lot of stress on the network.
I'm surprised that so many people in Europe are still using telephone lines. Isn't the European Infrastructure superior to the United States? I would image everyone there had xDSL or ISDN or Cable.
The REAL problem is that we keep trying to use the exsisting infrastructure for something it's not meant to do, in order to save money. This actually costs MORE and the users also have to suffer high costs and pathetic bandwidth. Hopefully the world will wake up someday to a SEPERATE, high bandwidth digital network just for the Net. No electrical sockets or cable TV jacks or telephone lines. Fiber optic for extreme bandwidth, copper for decent (100Mb/s) bandwidth and satalite for remote areas (100Mb/s?). Of course, it's unlikley to ever happen (except maybe satalite uplinks).
I live in British Columbia, Canada. Local calls are free, and long distance calls within Canada during off-hours have a cap of $20 CAN (that means that you never have to pay more than $20 a month for off-hours long distance). Off-hours is from 6pm to 8am.
While at university, I shared a phone line with three other guys. In one month, we racked up 8000 minutes (yes, eight thousand) of long distance (and who knows how much local calling), and only ended up paying about $90 CAN (that's less than $60 US). That includes basic service, call waiting, four voice mailboxes, and long distance.
Since the CRTC opened up the long distance market to competition, prices have become very reasonable. BCTel (now BCTTELUS after the merger with Alberta's phone company) has started giving really good deals on long distance, and local calls are free, as always.
I can't imagine having to pay for local calls--it would totally change the way I use the phone. I remember seeing stats somewhere about phone use in the UK vs. US. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think phone use was at least an order of magnitude greater in the US. You poor Europeans don't realize how great non-metered local calling (not to mention non-metered long distance) is. No wonder you're so defensive about how good your infrastructure is. Does it really matter if you have all-digital exchanges if it's so expensive that you almost never use them?
There are an increasing number of "free" ISPs in the UK - they don't charge you anything, but they are tied in to a phone network company and receive a share of the call charge (which is typically about 1 penny per minute, off peak).
The next development is likely to be a return to ISPs charging a monthly fee, but providing an 0800 (free) number for dial up. This can work because the cost to the phone companies of each call is so small
So even if they don't make standard local calls unmetered, they will be unmetered for internet connections.
A "boycott" under the rubris that the product is "too expensive" is a tautology, and therefore ill-named.
Clearly, if you don't want to pay so much, use the product less. Use the Internet at your office or school, and dialup less from home.
The same silliness was tried in California wrt/ gasoline taxes, and marketed as a "media stunt." But boycotts and their associated media maelstroms only work if there is a real threat...
...such as cutting back on you Internet usage by a significant portion for some extended period of time.
Just remmember that the US FCC is talking about the same sort of thing.
I look at it like this: I pay each month for a pipe to the net, and I want to be able to use it for anything I want. Telcos don't like this because they aren't getting their 'fair' share of my money:)
Also, look at AT&T. They are converting their ENTIRE network to IP because they know it's more efficient.
As the data traffic to voice traffic ratio passes 50%, it becomes more efficient to make voice 'look' like data and to optomize the network for data then make data look like voice (i.e. a modem)..
Just my two bits....