It's now been half a year since the first unmetered/freecall providers started to crop up and change the British Internet. While we won't truly know until the end of the year (final report), now is as good a time as any to take a look into the status of freecall ISPs in the UK.

Over the last 6 months the ISPreview team has kept constant and daily news updates on the status of the UK ISP market. One of the primary reasons for our existence came from the belief that unmetered was on the horizon and that people would require a useful information source. As such we have grown, but along the way seen a lot of changes, not least in the unusual uptake of freecall access.

Huh, unmetered, what's that?

The first thing we have to remember about unmetered is that it's not one of those on or off-peak packages like BTI or Clara have going, it's a full 24/7 - pay once per month or annual system. Unmetered means just that; there should never be a time when calls are metered if you're paying for an unmetered service. In the modern day, many of us refer to unmetered as anything related to 'FreeCalls'; as such we may use the same analogy here.

Back in June'99 an ISP known as 'Screaming.Net' broke headlines by introducing a free off-peak calling option, it meant you had to change Telco, but that didn't seem to bother the thousands that moved. Within a matter of weeks the service became swamped and dipped into a lengthy period of connection problems and service issues, some of which have yet to be completely fixed.

Despite this dramatic failure they managed to spark a small revolution. Within a couple of months several ISPs had introduced weekend 0800 (freecall) options and suddenly a new generation of ISPs were born. From there the situation progressed until modern day 2000 where several large 24/7 freecall providers are in action. The question is, how has freecall/unmetered access progressed and how will it progress into the future?

What is the status of unmetered?

Unmetered may seem like a dream come true for consumers, although the reality is a lot further from the truth than many of us could ever have imagined. At the business end it's an economists worst nightmare, making the system pay for itself and breaking even are two key factors that are constantly causing problems. A TOTALLY free 24/7 such as CallNet0800 or X-Stream (as close as you can get) has to rely heavily on advertising sponsorship just to survive.

To date the uptake of unmetered providers has been awesome in its strength, yet at the same time the burden on the providers to perform has been even greater. This has caused some very serious problems and at the end of the day it all comes down to money and plausibility. Any business analyst would tell you that a completely free ISP is improbable and we'd have to agree, so far we haven't seen a completely free ISP.

Sure, you shout, "X-Stream", but then take a look at it, in order to use their 0800 service you have to give up 20% of your screen space to advertising (technically that's a cost). As for the likes of CallNet0800, we seem to remember all it's members being charged £20 for a dialler, many of whom received one and were charged without being given an option, no wait, nobody! was given the option. Take a closer look at X-Stream, they are the closest to TRULY free 24/7 and their 0800 only works on around 50% of the UKs exchanges, not to mention only a further 30% can actually get connected to it.

So what's happening? Simple, the cost of running the service and making a profit out ways the importance of giving users a good service. Besides who wants to run a business if you can't make any money from it, even charities make some money. What does this do for unmetered? Well since there hasn't been one unmetered provider that hasn't had any problems, it puts the whole future of freecall access on somewhat of a tightrope.

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