I found an article today that was published in an internet magazine around 5-6 years ago. I was asked about finding the perfect Internet Provider…
Moving the goalposts
Having said this, ISPA membership is not the be all and end all, and an ISP can still be the mutt’s nuts without being a member - and a member can still cause massive headaches for its customers. This was the case for .net reader Sam, when she discovered that the goalposts were slowly starting to move, where her ISP was concerned.
“Until 1 November 2002, I’d been with BT Anytime for two years. It was priced at £14.99 a month for unlimited access which gave me peace of mind when I was online - no more having to watch the clock,” Sam tells .net. However the terms and conditions with BT’s Anytime service were changed and eventually the monthly payment was hiked to £15.99 a month, and the time you could spend online was limited to 150 hours a month - after which customers would have to use a pay-per-minute service from BT. Hardly Anytime anymore.
“Immediately I knew I had to find another ISP to avoid all those restrictions,” says Sam. “It would have been like going back to the days of paying per minute, having to watch how much time you spend online for fear of running up a huge bill. I thought about changing to another dial-up ISP until I discovered Freeserve Broadband. Just £79.99 for the self-install equipment and £27.99 a month thereafter. To think that it’s only £12 a month more than BT were charging and now I get high speed, instead of trying to dial up for half an hour to get online - it’s bliss.”
I had to laugh, especially because I seemed perfectly happy to be paying not only £80 for the Speedtouch USB modem…which looked like a green jellyfish, but also £28 per month for 512k broadband! Now I pay £7.50 per month with o2 Broadband for up to 8MB - and of course you get the modem/router thrown in for free, much like you do with most ISP’s thesedays.
Anyone else out there paid what they now realise to be over the odds for 512k broadband? I’m glad that broadband internet is coming down in price when everything else seems to be going up.
27 Jan 08
7:39 pm
I remember having a 128kbps ISDN line at the school I worked at. For 100+ workstations. Wasn’t pretty.
27 Jan 08
10:04 pm
Ouch. Can’t imagine how painful that would have been
I was actually on 512k for quite a few years, then Wanadoo (who took over Freeserve) upgraded me to 2MB broadband and I had nothing but trouble, especially when they *then* became Orange (spits). Felt like I was back on dial-up. I wasn’t with them long after that
01 Feb 08
3:44 pm
Over the odds for 512? I remember spending £8.95 on Planet Internet Dial up, which got me 2 free hours of use (excluding call charges of around 2-3p per minute off peak) and then I paid an additional £1.50-2 per hour plus call charges after that. I used to save £50 a month to cover my internet charges, and that was for 28.8kbps connection!
I got ADSL for my work as soon as it came out so my boss was paying £40 a month for 512k connection at first. It does seem mad how much we were prepared to pay then and how much we’re prepared to pay now!
10 Feb 08
12:29 am
That’s pretty shocking, Sarah
I remember dreading the phonebill coming in during the dial-up days. I think our bills started increasing every quarter, the more and more my internet addiction took hold, haha. Wasn’t unusual to have quarterly bills of around £200 back then. And remembering how long it used to take to get re-connected after we were cut off after 2 hours of useage with BT Anytime! If I was on MSN messenger I had to tell my friends that I was about to be thrown off, but that I’d be right back as soon as I got connected. During peak times that wasn’t easy!!
I don’t know how we’d cope with going back to switching on our computers and NOT being readily connected to the net as we do so, without any prior fiddling around.