Re: BT Internet

["Mark McCall" <Mark@xxxxxxx>]

> For those considering a 1 year signup, it might be best to hold off...
> There are already 3 ISPs offering 0800 at all times, with no
membership
> charges, and AltaVista announced yesterday that they will be
> doing the same
> shortly... obviously, presumably unlike BT, you sacrifice not
> having to pay
> for the phone bills for some sort of advertising attempt or other
subsidy,
> but it might be worth considering...

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/8/ns-13840.html
AltaVista offers unlimited surfing for £10 a year
Fri, 03 Mar 2000 16:50:15 GMT

Jane Wakefield

Internet firm AltaVista brings affordable access to UK users. Jane
Wakefield
gives an exclusive report

UK consumers will be able to surf the Net for as long as they like for just
£10 a year, ZDNet has learned. Internet firm AltaVista will announce its
service on Monday, based on a new business model.

The service -- which is expected to be commercially available in the
summer -- sees AltaVista as the first big Net player to take the plunge in
the uncharted waters of free Internet calls with its nearly free service.
CallNet 0800 set the ball rolling when it launched its totally free service
back in November. Since then, ISPs like X-stream have trialled similar
offerings, but most of the big ISPs appear to favour the traditional
subscription model -- offering unmetered calls for a monthly fee -- amid
worries that networks would not cope with demand.

Gartner Group analyst Adam Daum believes AltaVista's offering -- as yet
unnamed -- will sound the death knell for BT's unmetered offering,
Surftime.
"If AltaVista can manage to pull this off and make a business out of
it,
Surftime is dead in the water," he says. "I have been saying for
years that
this is what consumers want."

It is believed AltaVista will team up with telco MCI WorldCom to deliver
the
service. Daum thinks ISPs will watch with interest to see how the network
copes with demand. "It is something other players have been worried
about.
If WorldCom can't do it, nobody can," he says.

CallNet 0800 welcomes the new service, claiming that it endorses its own
business model. "The UK undoubtedly wants totally free access.
AltaVista is
a world-class organisation, and we are pleased to have them by our
side,"
said a CallNet spokesman.

Details of the service are thin, but it is thought users will be charged a
one-off £35 connection fee, with a yearly £10 fee. AltaVista launched a
similar offering in the US last summer. In return for free access, users
had
to watch a constant stream of ads and have a personalised AltaVista page as
their permanent homepage.

In order to offer free calls, AltaVista will have to subsidise the service,
which is another worry for mainstream ISPs. Line One's managing director,
Ajay Chowdhury, claims it would cost his company up to £50m a year to offer
a similar deal.

While CUT (Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications) welcomes AltaVista's
announcement, it is worried that deals like this obscure the real issue of
pay-per-minute access. "Deals like this don't deal with the root of
the
problem, which is the high price of buying flat-rate from BT," he
says. "New
media companies subsidising telephone companies is not the long-term
solution."








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