Re:How does Surftime work? (Score 1)

I work for an ISP and we were offered surftime a while back. IIRC Surftime works like this - BT own the modem racks and rent them out to ISP's (boxes with multiple modems connected to bearers usually). They then stream the data to the ISP. The ISP gets money from the connection fee. These systems (Including ADSL) work due to contention ratios, i.e. you have a ratio for the number of customers to the number of active customers - if I have 1000 customers and can only support 50 at a full data rate then I have a 20:1 ratio. As most customers don't stay on for hours at a time and even when they do they aren't always pulling down data at the full rate this works ok. But it only works if you have a large number of customers. For smaller ISP's this just isn't an option.

They'll set it up to time out automatically if you don't keep the connection alive.