Altavista, who host one of the leading Internet search engines, recently announced that they will soon be providing freephone access numbers in conjunction with their free ISP service.
As Internet and telecom companies flood the market with attractive‑looking offers of 'free unlimited Internet access', many people have been left wondering whether there's any catch, and if not, then which one to choose. Dave Shapton sheds some light on these new services and puts the economics of free Internet access under the microscope.
Recent offers of 'free' Internet access have created a lot of interest amongst SOS readers, but some confusion as well. If all of these services were actually free then surely our advice would simply be 'pick any one, because they're all free'? Needless to say, it's not that simple. There's no guarantee, either, that if I write anything here about specific Internet access providers it will still be current when you finally get to read it — new free Internet schemes are being announced at the rate of several per week, and existing ones are changing to stay competitive with more recent entrants to the marketplace. So, rather than attempt to give a definitive 'consumer guide' to existing free providers, I'm going to talk about the types of scheme on offer, what the advantages and potential pitfalls might be, and give you some background to the way ISP (Internet Service Providers) can make money even when apparently supplying you with something for nothing.
Calling Charges
The biggest Internet service provider in the UK is currently Freeserve, which has now teamed up with telecommunications company Energis to provide their own unmetered Internet service.
The first commercial ISPs made money by charging Internet surfers for whatever they could: a monthly subscription charge and a charge based on the amount of time you were connected were added to the costs incurred by phone‑calls (often non‑local) to the ISP's Points Of Presence (connection telephone numbers) — frequently this would mean monthly bills of a hundred pounds or more! Fairly soon however, competition between ISPs brought about flat‑rate charging, where users were only charged a monthly fee on top of their phone bills, and Points Of Presence sprang up in every local telephone area, decreasing call tariffs. This system survived until some ISPs recently began offering the user unlimited connect time for free — Freeserve (www.freeserve.co.uk), an offshoot of Dixons, is probably the best‑known and most spectacular example in this country, but it hasn't become the UK's biggest ISP and a sizeable business in its own right by not making money! The so‑called 'free' ISPs often actually make their money by sharing the income from the calls that users have to make with the local telecom provider — although this may amount to only a penny or so a minute, it adds up to quite a sum when you have hundreds of thousands of customers connected for hours at a time!
It all made sense until the beginning of March this year, when Altavista (www.altavista.com) announced that they would be rolling out an 0800 freephone service within the next three months — it looks like all you'll pay for unlimited Internet access will be around £40 as a setup charge and £10 per year to subscribe. How can Altavista ditch the income from its share of phone charges?
Firstly, by advertising. Sites such as www.freeserve.co.uk are 'Portals' through which users and visitors must pass to reach any proprietary content — you'll find that ISP/Portal companies always make their web site your default home page, because having lots of regular visitors through their site means that it will register more hits. And more hits means higher charges to anyone wishing to advertise with them. There are now several freephone ISPs which derive income from blatant and possibly annoying advertising, X‑stream (www.x‑stream.co.uk) being one example. It's fair enough to be bombarded with advertising in exchange for a free service (that's how commercial television works, after all), but on a practical level it can slow down your surfing and I'd be quite happy to pay not to have to put up with it, myself
Signal Routing
Telecommunications companies are now setting up their own free Internet services, such as this one available from NTL, which take advantage of existing hardware networks.
Freeserve have found another way to make money, while still competing with the other freephone ISPs. Their newest offer has two quite separate deals. One is for 'unmetered access' at off‑peak times for £6.99 a month (which will still generate substantial revenue), and the other is for unmetered access at all times as long as users route their phone calls through Energis, Freeserve's partner in the scheme, and spend at least £10 a month on calls. You need to look carefully at this latter type of deal, though — even though it wouldn't be difficult to knock up £10 worth of calls to cover the minimum usage required, these calls won't necessarily be competitive with, for example, BT. They all claim to offer discounts relative to BT's standard charges, but very few BT users actually pay these charges because of BT's own discount structure, and so this could mean that what the ISP seems to give you for free actually causes your phone bills to rise. And where the phone company is connected with the ISP, they still get the money they want out of you.
However, some competitive cable and telecom companies are now also offering free web access as an incentive for customers to join their networks. One such company is NTL, which has what looks to me like one of the best offers: subscribe to their service at their normal rates and you get freephone Internet access at no extra cost. Also, because NTL own a communication infrastructure, I'd expect the service to be pretty good as well. Too bad if you don't live in an area that they cover, but I've heard that they are planning to offer a service via a telephone adaptor that routes your calls over their network. You pay £10 a month for this and £10 for a call rerouter. BT also have free web‑access options, but they have been subject to so many changes and about‑turns that I don't think it's worth detailing them here, because they'll probably have changed again by the time you read this.
Further Down The Line
So the choice of whether you go for a freephone ISP, and which you should go for if you decide to take the plunge, mostly hinges on whether you can face wading through piles of web advertising, and if not then whether you can find a deal that won't increase your phone bills too radically. However, there are a few other things to take into consideration: firstly, you may need to be patient for the time being, because all the free offers so far have been massively oversubscribed to the extent that some ISPs' servers have been sending out error messages instead of registration forms. And remember that the long‑term goal of most of the Internet providers is to secure your registration details — it's as simple as that, because the more users they have the more they are worth — but this means in practice that I doubt if any of these free schemes will be around in the long term. More likely is that we'll all have free access to the Internet — we'll end up paying for the amount of data we download instead. This will almost certainly be the business model of third‑generation mobile‑phone Internet access, which is set to become the dominant way we use the Internet in the second half of this decade.
And on a more specific note, if you're using real‑time and professional multimedia software, you may find that many services use installation CD‑ROMs which can tamper with your existing finely tuned computer settings, subsequently interfering with its performance. I would recommend trying, wherever possible, to configure your own dial‑up networking — some free‑connect‑time ISPs are designed for this, such as www.free4all.co.uk, and just provide you with a log‑in name and a password, leaving you to set up the Internet connection manually.
Also, bear in mind that new offers are coming out faster than I can type, and it's quite possible that all of this information may have changed by the time you read it. If you want up‑to‑date info on freephone ISPs have a look at www.net4nowt.com/unmetered. Most importantly, it's worth remembering that High‑Bandwidth Internet access is only around the corner. This definitely won't be free, but it will be at least 10 times faster than your modem access and won't be a dial‑up connection: you will have a permanent connection to the Internet. For my money (probably around £50 a month of it) I'd go for this option because it will transform the way I use the Internet. It will make possible streamed audio and video, huge file downloads and instant access to just about everything. I've spoken to people lucky enough to get on to the BT ADSL trial and they all tell me they would do almost anything to keep a facility like that. Expect to see ADSL and Cable Modem access being rolled out during the course of this year.
Until high‑bandwidth Internet access comes into mainstream use, however, free Internet access is a fantastic facility, even if it's usually not completely free. And for those who only do casual browsing and send email, it's all you need. It's a bit like the difference between having your own studio and having to write and record songs in a commercial studio. It's always nicer when the meter's not running.
What is an ISP?
We've become so used to the existence of Internet Service Providers that most of us don't even stop to think why they are there at all. Yes, they give us our connection to the Internet, but why can't we just connect to the Internet directly? Well, I suppose the main reason is that we don't have the physical means to connect to the Internet, which at its core operates over very high‑bandwidth data links. What we do have is a telephone wire coming into our home, but that is a very low‑quality audio cable rather than a decent data‑transfer medium. However, it can be fooled into sending digits by using a modem, which can turn digits into a warbling cacophony that fits into the audio bandwidth of the telephone line, and which can be decoded into meaningful data at the other end.
The technology inside modern modems is quite incredible and they can transfer data nearly as quickly as ISDN, which is the digital protocol that much of BT's exchange equipment is based on. However, having a modem is not the same as having an Internet connection — with a modem you can dial up other computers and exchange data with them, but this is a point‑to‑point connection so you can't simply browse around for other modem users. In effect, the Internet and the telecommunications network can be thought of as separate entities (although this is likely to change as Internet‑type technologies become more pervasive), and Internet Service Providers act as a bridge between them.
To receive data from the Internet, what your computer needs is an Internet Protocol (IP) address, rather than just a telephone number, and this is what your ISP provides when you connect to it using your modem. The ISP has loads of IP addresses, but not normally as many as it would need if it were to give a unique one to every customer. As a result of this, it allocates each user an IP address from its pool of addresses each time they log on. The downside of this is that you can't set your computer up as a web server (though most ISPs give you space on their own server for you to host a site), but the advantage is that you are less prone, if not immune, to hacker attacks because your IP address changes each time you log on, so hackers cannot attack your particular machine in any organised manner.