Do your friends a favour

David Dorn discovered only this week that a friend of the family was paying enormous telephone bills for Internet connection - and kicks himself for not being a better friend sooner!

One thing about being a somewhat nerdish computer geek - and an UberGeek, to boot - is that I can forget that not everybody has a fast ADSL connection to the 'Net - it's very easy to get used to and even easier to assume that this is what the 'Net is always like.

Indeed, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm acutely aware of HTML page sizes and the struggle to keep pages loading quickly, because modem connections aren't really all that fast, I could easily forget that modems exist. Now, that isn't me trying a bit of one-upmanship, but it's a salutary reminder to me and, I hope, you that not everybody has cottoned on to the good things in life.

It was brought home to me on Thursday of this week, when a friend of the family visited our house, and in course of normal conversation let it slip that she was paying over £200 a quarter on the phone bill. My immediate reaction was 'Gordon Bennett - have the kids not got mobiles?', to which she replied 'No - it's Internet use that's got it up that high!'

It turned out that the £200 was mostly accounted for by the family as a whole logging on at all times of the day and night, using 0845 numbers. They haven't got an unlimited or unmetered ISP - like AOL, for instance.

After a sharp intake of breath, I quickly informed her of the AOL unmetered tariff, told her how to get sorted and gave her an AOL CD - their house must be about the only one in the country that had never had one! I trust that by now, the household's phone bill is well on its way to being reasonable once more.

The thing is, of course, unless we, as the lucky (or sensible) ones, ask the question, we don't really know whether our mates are getting a decent price for their Internet access.

Address

In my book, you see, £15 a month for unmetered access is a Godsend. It's fixed price, and, OK, I know that at some times of the day things do slow down a bit, but I'm here to tell you that it really doesn't matter which UK ISP you connect through - they all slow down at those times - it's not just AOL or Fr**swerve or BTOpenwoe - the 'Net just gets full as everybody logs on. I suppose it's much like the phone lines during the voting period for Pop Idol a week or so ago - ours were completely shot, and we had to resort to mobiles to get a line!

You can, though, get a hint as whether they're likely to have unmetered access, just by examining their email address. If it's an '@AOL.COM' address, the chances are they're OK. Same applies to a few others. But there are some ISPs that simply do not have unmetered access available to them.

I consider it my duty, now, to ask the question - 'Do you get unmetered access?'. If the answer is in the negative, then I reckon it's time to get into my best 'Well it's time you did' mode!

Obviously, from the AOL point of view, I'd far rather they took out a subscription with AOL - and logged into Practical PC every day - but if they want to go another route, that's fine too - as long as they're not paying over the odds.

Free

The problem is, historically, the word 'Free' of course. You see, in the old days, no matter how you connected to the Internet, you had to pay a subscription. That applied to every ISP I'd ever come across. Then FreeServe happened along (in the UK) and used the revenue sharing 0845 model to allow people to create an account that carried no subscription charges - but did carry a cost, in that the ISP raked off some of the call costs. The word 'free' was bandied about. Yes, the account was free to set up, but it wasn't 'free' to use - you were paying, and the ISP did get some of the money.

These days, though, we're better off paying to subscribe and then getting all our calls 'free' (and since they're 0808 or 0800 numbers, that's exactly what they are)

Which do you think your friends would rather have - a 'free subscription' (worth, erm, not very much, but let's say a tenner) or a £15 pound subscription and unlimited time available to surf, email, chat... (worth, as I once calculated £3,182.40 if you stay online 24/7 for a quarter)

I think the answer is plain to see! So be a friend and ask the question, eh?

 

David Dorn