Free ISPs -- no fairytale ending

Tony Westbrook AnchorDesk

Published: 19 Jan 2001 17:37 GMT

In the first wave of completely free internet services offered when the industry was expecting an unmetered tariff from BT 'real soon', and when the local loop was expected to be released from BT bondage, a raft of companies promised to deliver internet access for a flat fee. Some even got as far as delivering a service (for a while).

And even more amazingly some of us managed to get signed up to such services before they closed their doors to all comers because of rampant oversubscription. I was just such a lucky person.

I signed up to a service called RedHotAnt. A spin off of a company called JAK (the connection has proved hard to find, especially since they ceased providing a service), RHA offered several levels of service. I chose the one that gave me free calls all day as well as off-peak. It cost me a £20 sign-up fee plus £30 for the 'first' year's fee. The same service was still being sold as recently as 31st December for a lot more -- £130 -- and the service was switched off on the 16th January. No refunds, no support, no goodbyes.

Now I reckon I got good value out of my connection as I had it available for at least 6 months before it went belly up. I recovered my £50 in phone charges. But pity one ZDNet reader who paid £130 for just ten days connection. He feels justifiably peeved that RedHotAnt was still taking subscriptions on 31st December, just 16 days before it stopped operation completely.

But even if I did get my money's worth, things were far from plain sailing when using the service. About two months into using the service, which was always pretty unreliable -- I would typically have to dial in ten times for each successful connection -- all subscribers got a very grumpy email telling them off for staying connected for long periods of time. Well lets think about that! If you have a very low confidence of getting a connection, what are you likely to do when you finally succeed in connecting? You'll stay there for as long as you can before getting thrown off. And so people did.