ISP War in the UK 91
Darren.Moffat writes "Seems like round 2 of the ISP war is about to start in the UK,
The full story is online. " Quick Summary: For our readers who've never had to deal with metered calling, there's a running charge for /all/ calls, not just long distance (stupid, I know). But it appears that the two biggest British ISPs are now working with the phone companies to lower those rates. This could be a big breakthrough in the amount of time that Brits spend online.
Brits online? (Score:1)
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Re:It really adds up (Score:2)
Yes, but tell me you didn't feel slightly sad ringing BT up and asking them to register your ISP as your best friend.
Some uk teleco's are trying to scrap 'free' calls (Score:1)
Kithran
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
In which case it would be to BT's advantage to have offered 0845 numbers to ISPs in the same way as other telecos. Then they would be able to keep all of the charges paid by the caller instead of having to pay interconnect charges to the terminating teleco.
So long as these ISP's used BT lines, also BT ran (and probably still runs) their 0845 numbers on an "overlay" network, specifically set up for short duration calls. They originally did this to support their old equiptment. Every other UK PTO started with SPC (Stored Program Computer) digital exchanges (except KC which deployed them before BT anyway).
Also it's doubtful that Oftel would have allowed BT to give money to it's customers for 0845 calls.
(This is is the way the likes of Freeserve are funded.) Oftel tends to keep a close eye on BT (and to some extent KC) with regulation of any other UK PTO being a matter for the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) or Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:2)
Nope, I don't have to. Doesn't stop me enjoying it occasionally. Get a grip why don't you?
However, I shall amplify my point for the slow of thinking.
If call charges were dropped then there would be more people online more of the time, which would mean that ISPs would need to buy lots more modems and phone lines. On top of that, more people online for more time would necessarily use more bandwidth, and bandwidth costs to ISPs are outrageous (Charlie is right when he reckons that a 64Kbps line in the UK costs about the same as a T1 in the US) mainly because of the astronomical cost of laying transatlantic cables. All these costs would have to be borne by the ISPs.
Back when I was still involved in the ISP we set up we realised that, if unmetered calls did come in, we would almost certainly be obliged to either jack up our subscription charges, introduce some form of metering of our own, or impose strict call time limits. Or go under.
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
I can't really comment on intra-national long-distance rates, but for international long-distance, US companies are generally much cheaper that other telcos. Note the popularity of so-called "callback" long distance services for calls to the states. What those companies basically do is provide you with a dial tone from a US telco, usually _significantly_ cheaper than directly dialing to the US yourself...
Funny I should be reading this at the same time as I open my bill from Bell Atlantic. So for comparison purposes, the local charges on my bill (as listed):
1) Flat Rate Service $8.47
2) Bell Atlantic Calling Card $0.00
3) Flat Rate Usage $13.56
4) Non Published Service $1.95
And the following mandates:
FCC Line Charge $3.50
Local Number Portability $0.21
911 Surcharge $0.35
Etc., etc. Plus, of course local/state sales tax and a federal tax.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that local US telcos don't require flat rate service--if you prefer, you can be billed per-minute for local calls, which makes sense for those who make very few calls per month. Anyway, the point is that you have a choice. Guess which option most people choose?
Re:No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos (Score:1)
But I cannot agree with you more about the TransCo model. It makes so much sense. I wonder whether it would work if everything under the road was owned by a single company, and roadworks could be better-coordinated (like the Heinekin advert)?
Hamish
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
Currently it takes around one (count it, 1) whole month for a piece of transatlantic fibre to go into profit. Someone is making a fsck of a lot of money out of us.
However, back to the various issues involved in UK unmetered calls. Currently UK ISPs build to a roughly 30:1 modem user ratio. At current UK prices for bandwidth and access routers, it's only just economical for an ISP to operate at those sorts of ratios. In fact most make a loss, or are owned by telcos...
(I won't go into the erlang number that UK switches are built to, but lets just say the telecoms infrastructure in the UK is getting very close to the limit of the number of concurrent calls it can take...)
And the BT line pricing issue is one that *may* be going away. Prices in London are now below £3K pa for 64K, though 10:1 contended in the BT cloud. And OFTEL are due to report back by the end of the year on the current state of Internet access services in the UK.
It's just a pity that my contacts tell me consumer ADSL large scale trials aren't now due until the end of January/start of February.
S.
(Good grief, you, me and Charlie in the same thread. It's a gathering of the UK ISP old ones)
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
There are a very few ISPs that are making operating profits in the UK, but I think that the majority of those do very little in the way of dialup, choosing to concentrate more on leased lines, web serving and co-location. After all, since there's so little money to be made from serving hoi polloi it is far better to concentrate on providing a high quality service to corporations at a profitable price.
the whole thing stinks... (Score:3)
All paste something I wrote about this situation a while ago, based mostly around my experiences here in Sweden. If I'm factually wrong about something here, I would like to be corrected.
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OK, onto the a couple of days delayed summary of the entire telecom situation. I'm probably not the most knowledgeable person about this, you will find. In fact, it has been very difficult for me to try to get most of this stuff straight myself (and some of it might still be, em, bent). However, it seems a lot of people absolutely no clue about this, so maybe I can bring some light to it for them. Observe that this deals mostly with Sweden (for obvious reasons my interest in other Telecom markets is limited). So what is up with the insane per minute costs in Europe? Well, basically those are there because the companies find them profitable, and don't feel like getting into a price war that will push them down. Now, that might seem obvious, but I know a lot of people think that the main Telecom company (that supplies the phone lines, in Sweden's case Telia) is the issue. They are not innocent, but then nor are any of the other players. Fact is, that most (like 90% or something) of the money you pay via your phone bill gets flushed right through to the ISP through agreements made when competition was first introduced to the Telecom market. As I understand it, the Telecom companies came up with the idea of having a fee for someone who carries traffic from their network, onto somebody else's, because back then the other networks in question were mobile phone providers, and the Telecom monopoly wanted part of the money made from calls on those phones. The ISPs love this: They get the money, which is ridiculously more than they have in costs, and the Phone company has to bill you, getting the badwill [teliasuger.org]. They could easily set up their modems on their own networks, diverted at your local switchboard, and charge whatever price they wanted, but why would they do that? Why is this not the case in America? Well, if you look in the history books back to the age when Compuserve and America Online ruled America, it was. The thing that makes America (and some other places, like Australia I believe) different from here is that they have a very regulated Telecom market (in America there is a whole government organ, the FCC, dealing with it), and one of the regulations is that local calls are free. So while the big ISPs were charging their per minute rates, a lot of small ISPs appeared that didn't. These consisted of people who bought a 2 megabit line at 2k $ a month, and then signed up 200 people at 20$ a month, and had themselves a business. These small ISPs put the pressure on the big ones, who had to offer flatrate services to survive. In Europe, where local calls are free, only the ISPs who own (or rent) their own telecom networks can offer flatrate, and they don't want to, seeing as they are cashing out big time on the situation as it is. So is the situation hopeless? Yes and no. All markets where companies are making to much money, sooner or later competition sets in and adjusts things. That is why we love capitalism. BUT, the thing is, the companies are already competing, just not by lowering the prices. You ever wonder how the Swedish (and I believe other European) ISPs can afford to sell modems for free to new subscribers? Well, look on your phone bill. Yupp, those hundred of Euros you pay every month are buying Sportsters for Mr. and Mrs. Newbie-"I vant to be on de Inter-net"-lamer. Go ahead, weep. The reason for this is that the ISPs are not interested in stealing customers who already use the Internet from one another, instead they are interested in getting as many of the NEW users as possible. And new users have it pretty damn good today, being showered with gifts from the ISPs (the rebate on a new computer can be in the vicinity of 200 Euros is Sweden if you sign up with and ISP when buying it). Sooner or later, however, so many people will have signed up that the ISPs will have to start looking at one another, and then I think we will have a pricewar. In Sweden, I do see this happening, at least to some extent, in the not so far future. Most people know about the 1 month offer that Swedish ISP Tele2 had for half the minute charges this spring, but this is not what I am talking about, since they were using it to convince people to sign up for their long distance calling service, and never advertised it to people who were not already customers. However, a few weeks ago I received a letter from Tele2 asking that I start using the numbers on their long distance carrier permanently, and that the old "normal" numbers might be shutting down. That is a better sign. What about the new technologies like ADSL? A very tricky question that no one really knows the answer to, at least no one who has felt like sharing it with me. I received and offer from Telia right when I came back from Indonesia that to sign up for their ADSL service. The 2 megabit service came at the ridiculous price of-
Re:It really adds up (Score:1)
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
Don't US users pay a lot more for 'long distance' calls than we do anyway? What makes their phone system so great? They can't even get mobile phones working properly together over there
Unmetered calling in Ireland (Score:1)
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
And thats the point - calls to my ISP _are_ on the same exchange and at the moment they are flat rate. This has been the case for about 4 years. Despite this the cable company (Cable & Wireless) are now trying to remove the flat rate calls but only to business numbers. If it costs them (effectively) nothing to offer unmetered calls to residential customers why can't they continue to allow it for people wishing to call business customers?
I agree calls to the 0845 pop's should be charged but I see no reason why people should continue to pay for calls to their local exchange - especially when the call starts and terminates within the same teleco's lcoal equipment.
Kithran
Re:Unmetered - You just have to know how. (Score:1)
What the website doesn't say is whether there's a linux version, or indeed whether it's really a free ISP as distinct from another AOL...
No breakthrough in online time... (Score:2)
Nope. The real breakthrough will be when ADSL becomes widely and cheaply available. Mine's hopefully coming before Christmas, but my ISP has to wait for BT to sort out their ADSL pricing structure first...
Lowering local call costs will make some difference, and it has to be a good thing, but I wouldn't call it a breakthrough.
So, d'you think it's a lot better in Chicago? (Score:1)
Unlike *every* other Baby Bell I've ever dealt with...*and* Mother Bell before that, in "Big A" territory, you pay your monthly fee for a line charge, and there's a charge for Every Single Call.
Every other Baby Bell offers "basic" and "unlimited" service, with "basic" being dialtone, and 72 calls/month, and "unlimited" being not quite twice the price (it used to be $28 or $30/mo) for any number of calls, within the "local calling area", which in every *other* area, meant a calling radius of something on the order of 25 miles.
In Ameritech territory, not only is every call charged individually, but anything over, what, 6.5 miles, or 8.5 miles, I don't remember, is *metered*, just as the article mentions in the UK.
If you ain't got a POP within that radius, it's no different than the UK. C'mon, tell me Ameritech's trying to "limit bandwidth".
mark
Re:I still approve of metered calls (Score:1)
service. Indeed it's been claimed that the most expensive part of a call is recording it and the toner which
goes on the paper...
True as long as calls are generally short. A line that's connected 24/7 would cost the telco a significant amount (since in effect it would need to maintain a dedicated port)
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Re:Unmetered - You just have to know how. (Score:1)
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:2)
>calls than we do anyway?
I doubt it
In my wallet is a calling card that I can use from any phone for 9c/minute to anywhere in the U.S.
And it's tough to get past
Re:No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos (Score:2)
Don't you mean free evening and weekend enganged tones? :-) Screaming.net is *far* too slow for me. They've created too tempting a service, and so have more customers than they can deal with. They don't have enough bandwidth or the number of modems needed to cope with the demand.
I'd rather pay reasonable ISP and phone call charges to get a decent service.
Re:No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos (Score:1)
What this means is, J. Random Telco will have a mandatory right to enter BT's local exchanges and, in return for a nominal sum, splice your local loop (the twisted pair cable in the ground between your phone and the System X exchange) into their system.
This is exactly how the gas deregulation system works, and it's been very quietly mandated for telecoms. A bit late, I'll agree, but better late than never.
Why metered calls are *good* (Score:1)
Ever wondered why most all of Europe is now fully covered by mobile phone towers, with the majority of the population owning a small, digital mobile phone - while the US is still mostly struggling with analogue systems, big, low-tech phones and most people still using just a pager if they have that?
If people in the US are getting most of their calls "for free" anyway, then a mobile phone suddenly takes on a whole new complexion. Your not just paying a bit more for calls and the convenience - you're paying the whole lot on top of what you already paid in you standing charge to your land-line telco for these unmetered calls - why pay twice?
So you get less take-up on the phones, so the mobile phone companies have less capital to feed back into the infrastructure, and lo and behold, the US is 5 years behind Europe in the next technological leap.
OK, so this isn't totally down to unmetered calls - the shear size of the country makes getting coverage for each company really, really expensive, too. But I think it's a big contributer.
monopoly (Score:1)
Here in Norway, one of the richest countries in the world - we still have monopoly on the telecompany, Telenor. The normal working guy, have no alternatives to dial-up than a leased line - and thats EXPENSIVE up here.
Some cabel companies have established here - but none of them delivers outside the major city`s.
We pay aprox. 1-2US$ pèr hour for internet access.
Thats because Telenor owns ALL the telephone-cables in norway.
So - in UK, you at least have some sort of alternative.. we don`t.
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
>Don't US users pay a lot more for 'long distance'
>calls than we do anyway?
I doubt it :) I pay AT&T $9.95 a month to get 5c/minute around the clock (they advertise $5.95 for 7c; you have to know about this one to ask for it).
Hmm, I can call from .nl to anywhere in the US for around $0.07 a minute with no monthly fees, billing per second.
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Cheap/Free calls (Score:1)
Buckets,
pompomtom
Believe you me metered calling bites (Score:2)
For more useful information (Score:2)
Limit the size of emails? (Score:1)
European users would frequently ask people to trim their emails since the length was causing them to stay online longer and hence pay more...
Anyway, I also remember when FidoNET was one of the better ways of sending email around the globe... Ah, the good old days.
A little more thought? (Score:3)
In the UK we only have one major telco - BT. There are others but to be honest they are still at a stage where they either can't supply the whole country or their service is not up to the standards. We had one bright light in the distance (Ionica) but that went bust.
Now, at the moment it is *OFTEL* that are forcing BT to keep their prices at a competitive level so that OTHER Telco's can compete. While all the other telco's are struggling to provide free or near free calls BT charge as normal (although their prices are really coming down - it's less than 60p an hour now, which is around $1).
If BT were to go unmetered for local calls then you'd almost immediately squash out the competition, you only have to look at FreeServe - they were one of the first (if not, THE first) ISP that did not have any subscription charges and they singlehandedly changed the face of the ISP market (I used to run an ISP, trust me on this one) in the UK.
So we'd have unmetered calls for a while, the competition goes bust, and then BT might start to raise costs (justifying them all the way, *ofcourse*) and without any significant competition for their customer base to shift to what would happen then?
The other major point to consider is bandwidth. Having run an ISP I know exactly how much bandwidth costs in the UK and trust me it is orders of magnitude more than in the US, while most startup ISP's in the US were coming on with a T1 (1.544 Megabit) line, startup ISP's were coming online in the UK with 64k or 128k Kilostreams and probably paying MORE for them.
The same is still true, the numbers on both sides of the equation are just bigger now.
You think it's slow in the UK during peak times? Difficult to get on? If we go unmetered at the moment the Internet will become unusable in the UK unless you have access to a fat pipe - you can forget dialups.
Personally, I pay for my subscription to an ISP because I know that this means their subscriber to modem rate is going to be good, as well as their modem to bandwidth rate - which is equally important, not getting a busy signal is only half the story if you can't DO anything when you're online.
I would personally love unmetered time online, but the bottom line is that I still want to use the Internet at a reasonable speed. I upgraded to ISDN 64k to get reliable connections at a decent speed and at the moment my 'pay for' ISP is happily able to fill a single channel or both channels whenever I require it. Until the cost of bandwidth, the lines themselves and the equipment goes down I believe that unmetered calls would spell the end to the Internet, certainly to any ISP smaller than Demon, AOL, UUnet or Freeserve.
(whew) what a lot of waffle
Unmetered - You just have to know how. (Score:2)
Screaming Net is reportedly slow however. (it is a partnership between retailer Tempo, and telco LocalTel, just like Freeserve is a pertnership between Dixons and Energis)
http://www.08004u.co.uk/ [08004u.co.uk]Are now doing unmetered calls 24x7. However you do have to pay 50UKP per month subscription. One day our telecoms regulator Oftel will get its finger out and sort BT out.
Re:For more useful information (Score:1)
Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
First they charge obscene amounts for ISDN, then we're informed that they will do the same [theregister.co.uk] for ADSL.
I simply can't afford either ISDN or ADSL, and that prevents me from doing everything I want to online; Which could be starting up a new business or simply checking the news [bbc.co.uk]
I can think of 3 different reasons for BT's attitude to the net:
I'd imagine that not too many Americans surf with one eye on the connection time. I tend to think "can I download this new sourcecode, nope that'll cost too much"
:-(
Metered Calls suck, ISDN costs too much and ADSL's price will be astronomical. Welcome to 18th century Britain...
:-(
:-(
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
As an American living in Europe, I can confirm this. In the US, I had two phone lines so that I could stay online for longer periods of time. Here, I don't even own a modem on the computer at home. Luckily, the monopoly in the Czech Republic ends in just over a year, and hopefully that will help matters.
If Telecom would decide to try and sell a whole lot of lines cheaply, instead of a few expensive ones, they would do a lot better. This goes for as well.
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
Just as an aside on not affording ISDN, the only real cost if you're on-line more than 10 hours a week is the installation, the higher line rental is off-set by a call credit.
After getting Home Highway my quarterly bill dropped by £100. It's still too damned high though
Re:Thank God (Score:1)
Perhaps if it didn't have to feed it shareholders free local calls would have introduced some time ago.
This news item isn't really anything newsworthy anyway, the freeserve deal only applies if you make plenty of long distance calls, and the AOL deal actually make it more expensive that BT's rates-discount at weekend. It only makes sence for people who use it during the day.
Only the introduction of low priced cable modems, or ADSL will get rid of the call charges, but without action from our toothless friend OFTEL, this doesn't look like it will happen.
A free market economy also need competition to work properly, at the moment we have big old BT, and the dumb cable companies, nothign will be changing soon.
F
Maybe also related. (Score:1)
There's no free lunch (aka Metered calls are good) (Score:1)
Neither of them is free, in different ways. The first has no fixed charge but is metered through the telephone bill. The second would be unmetered but presumably have a higher standing charge.
Now, you can make a case that telecoms are overcharging. But that is an entirely separate issue from whether calls should be metered or unmetered. And given a choice between everyone being metered or everyone being unmetered, I'd go for metered every time.
Bandwidth is a scarce resource. By charging even a small amount for it you
I don't think it needs a high charge. I would guess that if the charge is metered instead of unmetered, the total charge would be lower for almost everybody, and the network would be less clogged up so that everyone could get their work, or play, done faster.
Oh, and hasn't anyone noticed that this model is popular with customers? It's essentially the model that Freeserve and their 100 imitators use, that has brought the internet to 100,000 new Britons a week for the last year.
Re:It really adds up (Score:1)
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
To be fair, though, it's not just BT. When BT was privatised in 1983, Oftel (the Office of Telecommunications) was set up to police their activities; at that point BT was a monopoly and Oftel was charged with preventing them suppressing the embryonic competition.
The actual result is that the "competition" has tended simply to make their pricing policies follow BT (minus some %).
As one of these moves, Oftel refused to give BT permission to provide free local calls. In 1983 this made eminent sense; if they hadn't, BT would be a monopoly to this day. Oftel also banned BT from cross-subsidizing business units, so that the ISDN roll-out (which would have been feasible in some areas as early as 1986) couldn't be subsidized by the profitable business and trunk sectors, forcing BT to develop it more slowly.
The way in which Oftel applies this "no cross subsidy" rule can be rather bizare. One result of this was to push up the costs of calling cards.
Since Oftel couldn't accept that it was actually cheaper for a PTO to operate this kind of service, since they don't need a stand alone billing setup or all the extra electronics to locate the hardware further than a few metres from the DMSU.
Note that other UK PTO's also charge ISDN at a premium (or simply won't provide it to residential customers) even though there is little difference in real cost between ISDN-2 and POTS lines. Indeed the latter may actually cost more since codecs are required in the concentrator. (Anyone know what the actual differences, in price, are from GPT, NT & Ericcson?)
ISDN's cost was not BT's only problem. (Score:2)
We had a constant problem where the ISDN connection to one teleworker's home would suddenly fail. A call would be placed to BT to resolve the fault, and it would eventually be fixed. In some areas this could happen two to three times a month.
I eventually managed to speak to a BT engineer. He stated that some BT engineers where cutting corners when connecting up unused pairs in the trunking system to traditional analogue phones. Instead of checking the documentation to discover which wire pairs were unused, to save time they measured the voltage across the pair - if there was no voltage it was assumed the pair was unused. Unfortunatly ISDN pairs also carried no voltage when not being used, and the ISDN pair got patched into the analogue network!
Of course BT never admitted a problem.
Also, when my employer relocated a few years back, it took almost a week for BT to get ISDN working to our new office. Since we relied on ISDN for our email communications to and from customers and suppliers, this was a major problem.
Re:Linux connection? (Score:1)
After looking at their website, it seems you have to use special software to connect to the 0800 service. Is this really true? If so, I guess there's no hope for linux connectivity.
Harks back to the qwest thread from a couple of days ago. The way it works is that most UK ISP's like to provide CDROMS containing a tweaked version of a web browser and some set up script. Even though they virtually all use standard PPP anyway. However with some (including BT Internet) getting relevent information out of them is a "blood out of stone" type exercise. Even on Windows platforms the "pre-canned" setup is only guarenteed to work on a "virgin" setup of Windows. In any other industry customers would see this as a bad joke....
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
it's one of those poor people one reads about
Do you have to mock someone because of their personal wealth? If you feel you have to, then you have my sympathies.
Re:Do We Really Want the Brits on the Internet ? (Score:1)
MJL - magimix '99
"Paradigm shifting without a clutch"
Re:Unmetered - You just have to know how. (Score:2)
The FAQ on their website in answer to the question "Who should sign up?" states "Absolutely everybody". It does not say "Everybody running Windows 9x/NT". So maybe there is hope.
Failing that there's the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Failing that there's the little matter of a law, passed in 1996, which requires goods and services to be "as described". So if they accepted someone's money without being able to provide the service the claim then they have to return that money (plus costs of requesting the money back, plus court costs, plus interest if that person sues them.)
Re:I still approve of metered calls (Score:1)
UK Cable companies should make things better... (Score:1)
Fortunately, we're finally seeing the cable companies make a national impact. And one thing US readers should remember is that UK cable subscribers tend to get a phone line as well: once NTL rolls out cable modem access, BT will have to make changes.
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
Newsweek [newsweek.com] explains the current situation in U.S. long distance.
Basically, the U.S. long-distance telecos have to pay $0.04 in per-minute fees to the local telecos for access to the local network -- and are charging $0.05 a minute to customers for long distance. So, modulo the local telco access charge, long distance in the U.S. is essentially unmetered if you buy, say, the $9.95-per-month AT&T plan.
If and when AT&T can get its newly acquired cable assets to operate as a local teleco, I would bet heavily on completely unmetered long distance soon following. (Maybe not from AT&T at first, but from somebody.)
Now, OTOH, I have to pay a metered $0.15 to call a location 10 miles away, becaue that's a "zone call". It remains entirely on my local teleco's own networks, but, without competition, who is going to stop them? So 100 minutes to 10 miles away on one company's network costs me 50% more than 1,000 minutes 2,000 miles away on three companies' networks. It's an unstable situation, and it will change -- the FCC is being nasty about denying the local telecos the chance to get into interstate long distance until there's competition.
Anyway, I expect in 5 years to have unlimited local calls, unlimited long distance, cable TV, and unlimited cable modem access for a combined bill of about $75 a month given current trends.
Re:the whole thing stinks... (Score:1)
I don't know about other DSL users, but I move anywhere between
Re:I still approve of metered calls (Score:1)
The usage sensitive costs are determined by the desired quality of service during peak usage periods. This means that off-peak usage doesn't increase the cost of providing the service.
There are some cities in the USA that only offer measured service. The usage charges are far in excess of the cost of providing service. I've read that the actual costs are a few tenths of a cent per minute.
Being more urbanized, it should be cheaper to provide telephone service in the UK.
I was once told that many European countries used PTT revenues to subsidize other government programs. Is that still true?
Re:the whole thing stinks... (Score:1)
Flat rate or "free" local calling is not available in all areas of the USA. Some large cities, such as Chicago and New York, only offer measured service. In other areas free local calls are restricted to artificially short distances. The rates for intra-state long distance calls are very high. I can call across the country for substantially less money than a similar call across the state.
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
Your first point, that BT is a monopoly, is obviously utter rubbish. You don`t like BT? Go choose from any one of 20 odd. national and cable companies to provide your service. That isn`t a monopoly.
Except many people in practice have a choice of 1
possibly two companies to provide them with a telephone line.
ISDN costs a lot? Do you have any idea of the work involved in installing an ISDN line? Nope, thought mot, it`s not a simple task, nor is it cheap. BT do not make buckets of cash from ISDN installations.
ISDN2 was specifically designed to work over existing copper pairs, in the first place. Even if BT can make a case of difficulties due to old equiptment and cabling this only applies to certain places (and only to BT.)
There's plenty of competition (Score:1)
We'd love to be able to come in and drop ADSL right into your home / business - but until we get access to the exchanges this cant happen.
And no i'm not saying who we are.
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:2)
To be fair, though, it's not just BT. When BT was privatised in 1983, Oftel (the Office of Telecommunications) was set up to police their activities; at that point BT was a monopoly and Oftel was charged with preventing them suppressing the embryonic competition.
As one of these moves, Oftel refused to give BT permission to provide free local calls. In 1983 this made eminent sense; if they hadn't, BT would be a monopoly to this day. Oftel also banned BT from cross-subsidizing business units, so that the ISDN roll-out (which would have been feasible in some areas as early as 1986) couldn't be subsidized by the profitable business and trunk sectors, forcing BT to develop it more slowly.
BT's strategic response was to massively upgrade their network bandwidth, so that they'd be ready for video on demand in the mid nineties. Then Oftel dropped the other shoe and ordered BT to stay out of the cable TV business -- to protect the then-growing cable industry. (The UK's cable infrastructure was only installed in the early 1990's; technologically it's a couple of generations more advanced than that of the US, but it has lower uptake.)
Today, however, circumstances have changed. There's a thriving cable industry, lots of competing telcos, 25% of the population have mobile phones (growing by something like 5% per year). The original Oftel objection to BT providing free local calls or VOD doesn't seem to stand any more, and it's writing BT a meal ticket by enabling them to keep line prices artificially high. They demonstrated this earlier this year; to protect their leased line business, when Oftel looked about to order them to roll out ADSL, BT cut the rental on a 64K leased line (with routers and IP traffic) from about 7000 pounds to 3000 pounds a year. If they can still break even at that price point, it suggests there are huge economies they can make elsewhere ...
It really adds up (Score:1)
Depending on which options you would like to take the call to your ISP may cost from 1pence/min up to 5pence/min. If you're online for an average of 15 minutes per evening (and we all know it is MUCH more than that ;-) your monthly fee to BT just for the calls adds up to £22 (about $13.50). Doesn't sound like much, but this is an example for 15 minutes only.
Personally I spend at least $20 a month just for the calls to my ISP. Add to that line rental, costs for all the discount options and the monthly fee to the ISP it really starts to add up!
Luckily my company is based at an University an we're basically sitting on the campus backbone. The bulk of my downloads is done from work, if not for that perk I shudder to think what my monthly phone bill would have been!
Unmetered local calls. (Score:1)
I think it the same story in my neighbour countries, but I could be wrong.
Re:There's plenty of competition (Score:1)
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much (Score:1)
Their answer (in the context of ISP services) was that if it wasn't then the phone system would get clogged with loads of modem calls, so we should think ourselves as lucky.
Go figure.
I still approve of metered calls (Score:3)
Unmetered calls mean that someone who makes a five minute call to their parents once a week, ends up subsidising people who spend all day dialled in to their ISP. That's just not fair.
Local calls *do* cost the telco money (the longer the average call becomes, the higher their peak capacity must become).
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Linux connection? (Score:1)
Maybe it's possible to connec via windows, grab the connection parameters then use linux.
Does anyone have any experience of this service?
Thanks,
Paul
Re:I still approve of metered calls (Score:1)
Unmetered calls mean that someone who makes a five minute call to their parents once a week, ends up subsidising people who spend all day dialled in to their ISP. That's just not fair.
Except that the costs of calls do not reflect the actual costs to the PTO of providing the service. Indeed it's been claimed that the most expensive part of a call is recording it and the toner which
goes on the paper...
Re:There's no free lunch (aka Metered calls are go (Score:1)
That is, I want to pay a flat rate per month or quarter. I can then use the net for whatever I want, whenever I want.
How many UK
Note for US readers: In the UK, BT charges 4 pence a minute between 8am and 6pm on weekdays, 1.5 pence per minute between 6pm and 8am on weekdays and 1 penny per minute at weekends
Oh, and hasn't anyone noticed that this model is popular with customers?
No, You could only make this statement if there was an umetered alternative available. IMHO, if there was, people would drop BT faster than you could say "monthly charge."
Re:A little more thought? (Score:1)
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
Maybe I'm being dim here, but why are metered local calls "stupid"? If you're calling from one line to another on the same exchange, then there's an argument that you're not using any of the telco's resources and so should be charged a flat rate.
There are then issues of "tromboning" (a call is connected from a concentrator to the DMSU then back to the same concentrator) as well as
what exactly is an "exchange".
However, the "local" call regions in the UK, I believe, cover more than one exchange, and anyway,
It's considerably more complex than than.
There are situations where remote concentrators are served by a DMSU in a different charge point.
Thus you have calls which use exactly the same number of resources get changed differently.
most ISPs that provide "local" access don't actually have shed loads of real local PoPs.
The additional complication here is that the 0845 number may be provided by a different PTO from either the originating or terminating line. At every point the call will incur an interconnect carge. (n.b. these have no relationship to customer call costs.)
BT especially tends to hide this so a BT customer who only ever calls other BT lines is in effect subsidising those BT customers who call non BT lines.
Re:Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:1)
Re:I still approve of metered calls (Score:1)
By the way, I'm all for an unmetered service of some kind, but I don't think it should be a telephone connection. Cable modems, DSL are going to be great (when they finally arrive at my backwoods abode
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No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos (Score:3)
You have no idea how much I wish this was true. However, it's not. If I want a phone, I have exactly two choices: BT or Cable & Wireless. Mobiles aren't an option -- they can provide phone calls, but not ISDN or ADSL. Even if they could, living in the shadow of a large hill, mobile coverage at my house is poor from all four networks. So much for "lots of competing telcos".
What the UK really needs is true telco competition. Cable infrastructure should be owned by a single regulated company, and the end user should get to choose their service provider. This is how gas works, for example. TransCo own the physical pipes to your house, but the actual gas comes from whichever provider you've chosen. As it stands at the moment, cable companies effectively have a government approved monopoly in any given area. That's great for the company, but poor for the consumer.
BT did the biz... (Score:1)
EEC legislature forced European Telco's into providing fully digital backbones across each country.
England was one of the first to achieve this, then got privatised (at a large profit to the cabinet ministers & cronies). I'm always amazed that countries like France & Germany are rabid pro-europeans, and yet last I checked, appear very low on the EU legislature compliance list...
Re:Unmetered - You just have to know how. (Score:1)
Why are metered local calls "stupid"? (Score:2)
However, the "local" call regions in the UK, I believe, cover more than one exchange, and anyway, most ISPs that provide "local" access don't actually have shed loads of real local PoPs. They just have one huge connection to a telco and special numbers (0845, etc.) that are billed the same as local rates. Either way, all the time you're connected you're using resources. Why shouldn't you pay for them?
Re:Unmetered local calls. (Score:1)
Local calls cost something like 1 cent/minute or something like that. You all should be happy to be able to call free...
Re:Unmetered - You just have to know how. (Score:1)
My experience is that if you are having trouble getting on due to the phone network being unavailiable then just keep trying.
Lets face it its FREE...
Have fun
Rossi
badsoft42@yahoo.co.uk
Re:Believe you me metered calling bites (Score:2)
Personally I hate metered calls and thats why I have cable (not because it's faster because here it isn't)
Re:There's plenty of competition (Score:2)