What about these commercial freecall providers?

Commercial freecall providers are a little more recent, popping up just after Christmas, many of them are new and have yet to grow any real roots in the industry. However you'd assume that a commercial freecall provider would be able to direct more money towards its service over one of less commercial (consumer wise) viability? Not so.

So far not one commercial freecall provider has managed to scale their network to the dramatic influx of new customers, they are finally starting to see that running an unmetered ISP is a lot more demanding than ever thought possible. The key mistake most of them make is that they assume producing an unmetered ISP would be much the same as producing a standard one, however the demand is nearly 6 fold.

As such, every new unmetered ISP experiences network, speed and connectivity issues for the first couple (or more) months and this in tern effects the support departments whom quickly become overloaded for lengthy periods. It doesn't matter whether you charge £50 or £0 per month, the chances of a new unmetered ISP going down the plug for a couple of months at the start have to be around 9 in 10.

It costs money to start any ISP, but the initial investment is never likely to yield enough for the network to be the size of the first demand, follow? As such, they have to wait until sufficient funds build up before upgrading the system and that means we, the consumers, end up having poor services for a while.

What is the status of unmetered?

The overall point we are trying to make is that unmetered access has yet to mature to a state where it can cope with demand. Networks are simply unprepared for the kind of upsurge in subscriber numbers caused by this latest trend. However there is light at the end of the tunnel because as they say, "Time is the perfect heeler" and indeed it is.

The fact is, if you can stand to wait and hold onto your cash for a few more months than the latest group of 24/7's will finally settle down. Even ISPs such as RedHotAnt and LineOne will eventually get things together and emerge victorious, simply because they have the backing and the money to do it. Not to mention that the introduction of Cable Modems and ADSL alongside BT Surftime2 is likely to help the situation and at least 'spread the load' somewhat.

So our initial look into the state of unmetered is that it still needs time, until at least July or August'2000 before things settles down enough to invest money in one. The long term future for unmetered in the UK looks good, although the effects it might have on other ISPs, along with the problems it may cause, won't be completely understood until the turn of 2001. One thing is for sure, there will be casualties to this invisible war of competition and invariably many ISPs will go down the plug. Keep reading ISPreview and we'll keep covering the state of British ISPs as much as we can.

We've only just begun to step on the bigger issues here, we'd prefer not the prophesies the future too much, as we've seen in the past just how much can change in such a short period. Come back at the end of 2000 =).

NOTE: We wrote this article before 'Visual Depth' introduced itself and became one of the first unmetered ISPs to avoid suffering any DRAMATIC problems.

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