On 21 Dec 2004 in uk.telecom.broadband, Ian Stirling wrote:
Surely there's more than just the connection to take into account... the
service has some fees associated with it for managing access (whether you
are on about BT Surftime, or some alternative, such as an indirect access
firm, as used by Claranet for their 'Freetime' service), and there may be
an element for traffic, though considerably less than for ADSL, plus they
have hardware, maintenance, and staff involved to manage/troubleshoot.
For Surftime, I felt sure I'd seen figures suggesting something close to
95 pounds a month for lines to be active 24x7 but I don't know if that's
to include all the costs associated with running an ISP or mostly on the
charges levied by BT for Surftime connection to the ISP, sorry.
When Claranet first offered their off-peak 'Freetime Unlimited' account,
an odd choice of name, but offering only web surfing, news and FTP, (ie
it has port blocking to limit/prevent peer-to-peer, IRC, IM, gaming) a
few users were pushing the connect time to the full (1800-0800 weekdays
and all weekend). Claranet charged 9.99 and indicated they were losing
money on the service, so restricted the "free" (covered by the monthly
fee) hours to 1800-0200 Mon to Friday, still allowing the weekends, so
someone can get around 320 hours a month for 9.99... they already had
a large collection of answering equipment, and presumably diverted from
people calling 0845 or local access (Energis) numbers over to taking in
the calls made via 1664 and 1690 prefixes. Peter M.
--
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My other ISP : UK Free Software Network <http://www.ukfsn.org>
UKFSN passes all profits to Free Software projects in the UK.
On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 16:52:11 UTC, Ian Stirling <root@mauve.demon.co.uk>
wrote:
It's called a SurfPort - various options. A basic SurfPort - minimum of
500 is 50 quid a month, roughly. Gets down to about 30 quid if you take
100,000 of them.
There are variations, and similar products too.
Of course, then there are equipment costs, staff, backhaul....
See:
<http://www.serviceview.bt.com/list/c...vices.boo/1080
13.htm>
for starters (but there is more all over section 28 of the Price List).
--
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Usually accompanied by silly noises and gestures - incurable, early
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