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The CUT Logo The Day the Innovation Died Doing Time Online

Doing Time Online For a government which claims to support the growth of an 'information society' in the UK, which dreams out loud of Britain as an online nation, little has been done to remove the one major obstacle to widespread uptake of the Net: metered, or pay-per-minute, access. British Telecom's policy of charging by the minute for local calls (in marked contrast to countries such as the US, where such calls are unmetered), and its near-monopoly on the local telecoms loop, is widely thought to be stemming the uptake of the Net in the UK. Is there light at the end of the tunnel for the UK's Net community in the shape of unmetered access from big-name providers? A recent incident involving net access through a BT 0800 number might provide some clues ... Until Now For years, the UK net community has been soldiering on in the face of BT's harsh pay-per-minute tariffs, surviving on Friends and Family call-reduction schemes and offline browsers whilst all the while dreaming of the flat-rate leased-line and broadband services which, horrifically overpriced, remain forever outside its grasp. BT's pricing structure may have failed to completely stem the growth of the net's popularity in the UK, but its metering of Internet access has produced an immature community of home users who are afraid of spending enough time online to get to know the net's protocols and learn about its mechanics. Many of those who would say they are 'online' are in fact limiting their use to a twice daily e-mail send-and-receive. 'Surfing the net', that most luxurious of activities, is something which happens only on an occasional evening or weekend, and even then for a couple of hours at the most. What is the possibility for learning and becoming a nation of Net experts in such conditions? BT's telecommunications policies, and OFTEL's weakness, has left Britain in a curious state: a hothouse of technological creativity where a low-bandwidth leased line still costs more than a mortgage on a small house; a nation of Web entrepreneurs whose projects are never seen by their fellow countrymen; a country with one of the most sophisticated understandings of media in the world for whom new media is still really new, and for whom net users are still to be regarded, variously, as geeks and perverts. BT has so much to answer for. Freefone Access All of this makes it rather fascinating that two weeks ago, over the weekend of the 15th to 16th of May, BT was 'caught out' by net users who discovered a 0800 number which connected them, for free, to its BT Internet ISP. Somehow the number got out on the alt.uk.internet.providers.free newsgroup – loose tongues, that kind of thing – or at least that's what BT has claimed. Within minutes, hordes of netters were spreading the message to various mailing lists. Those fearless enough to take advantage of what appeared to be a mistake on the telco's part started logging on, in droves. Until BT shut the number down, the UK net community's dream of unmetered access seemed to many to have arrived - by the backdoor. The running conjecture appeared to be that BT was testing a 0800 access service with which it would go public in due course in order to blow 'free' providers such as Dixon's Freeserve out of the water. But it may have even been the case, as some conspiracists suggested, that BT itself put the 0800 out on the wire to get a feel for running a live freephone service. The events of this week – see below - would certainly add some weight to that suspicion. Whatever the truth of the matter, BT had within 48 hours issued a statement denying that they had been testing any kind of unmetered service. The 0800 number was for BT employees, said a spokesperson, and was being used as part of a V90 modem trial. However, as many have privately pointed out, that explanation didn't really hold water because BT employees had no need of 0800 numbers to test their ISP from home. So the million dollar question is this: why did the nation's telecoms heavyweight risk getting caught with its fingers so deep in the pie of flat-rate access when it has, all along, denied that flat-rate is on its agenda? The UK market: look before you leap The first indication of an answer comes with an examination of the current state of the UK market. Sources inside the cable industry report various movements in the tectonic plates of flatrate and broadband access provision. BskyB and its consortium have been planning to launch a service in April this year which will provide email and Sky Interactive content via a TV box, distributed through digital satellite. Cable Operators such as Telewest, NTL and CWC, meanwhile, plan to use their greater bandwidth and more powerful return path to provide email, Internet, two-way TV and interactive content via digital cable. (The upload speed will, initially, be around 56k-64k, sources say, although download speeds will probably be substantially faster). The charge models for these services remain up in the air. A Cable and Wireless official I spoke to thought it likely that the company would be providing broadband Net access via cable modems some time in the foreseeable future, but was unwilling – or unable - to say whether it would be on an unmetered rate or not. He only said that he personally hoped that it would be. Until this week, it had seemed all too likely that, given the lack of regional competition in a cable market which is segregated into regional franchises operating as effective monopolies, a per-minute, metered system would prevail for the forseeable future. Cable operator NTL, for instance, recently offered an unmetered cable modem service which none of its fellow operators have so far seen any need to compete with – whilst extra business may be generated for NTL by the net community in its local franchise, it will not consequently be lost by anyone else in others franchises, unless consumers decide – as lobbying groups such as the Campaign for Unmetered Communications propose – to protest against the policies. Consumer unrest could prove quite a powerful motivator for BT, given the huge increase in internet use over its network (from 9 to 18 per cent of all its local calls last year) and the fact that around £500 million of its recently declared £4.3 billion in profits was down to calls made by net users. This year, that figure is likely to edge closer to £1bn, making the dial-up strike proposed by CUT a very interesting proposition. What's for certain is that all this would change if any one of the major players decided to opt for a truly unmetered model. Microsoft, for instance, are reputedly planning a 'WebTV' offering – Web and Email through the television - and they, as an industry source reported, 'are more likely than anyone else to charge monthly flat rates.' If Microsoft went ahead with these flat-rate plans, the hands of every single cable company and access provider in the country would effectively be forced. Franchises would fall over themselves to compete in the new market place, vying on terms of speed and throughput, cut-rate monthly charges, and value-added services. But far from committing to a model, these main players are circling the ring, eyeing each other cautiously, unwilling to commit to pricing structures and tariffs without having a firm idea of what the other is to opt for. No-one has yet wanted to commit to a truly unmetered system without knowing what's around the corner. LocalTel and screaming.net: leaping without looking Except that is, for LocalTel, a feisty telecoms upstart who, in conjunction with the high street electrics factor, Tempo, has jumped the proverbial gun by offering unmetered access to its own free screaming.net ISP in the evenings and over the weekend – on the condition that users sign up to its residential telephony service. The company's switchboard has, predictably enough, been jammed with people leaving BT and coming across to its network. Try dialling the LocalTel number: it's engaged twelve hours a day, presumably with frenzied net users eager to finally get in on the dream of unmetered surfing, even if it's constrained to off-peak periods. Unfortunately, it seems increasingly likely that LocalTel have bitten off far more than they can chew: initial experiences indicate that the service is already over subscribed, with the company eschewing early promises to limit subscriber numbers and greedily opting to sign up as many customers as possible. Customer service has already bottomed out, and early reports of poor data speeds and difficulty logging on may leave many wishing that they had stayed with BT whilst waiting for a more mature offering. LocalTel, for their part, claim to have doubled bandwidth in response to an 'unexpected' uptake of their offer. What BT may have learned from the LocalTel experience is that any company with willing and a robust enough infrastructure to provide stable flat-rate access can expect a steady flow of new subscribers through its doors. LocalTel may, in effect, have given BT a sour taste of what would happen to its subscriber figures should one of the main players turn on a flat-rate access scheme in a couple of months' time. Instead of letting thousands of relatively casual net users slip away, why not get ready with an easy-access 0800 service which will distract the less educated surfer from what will surely be the more expensive, because ancillary to any other telecoms already held by the consumer, broadband services offered by third-parties such as Microsoft? BT's 'secret plans' for 0800 access: last ditch tactics? All this has begun to look less and less like conjecture over the last week or so. First of all, last week's Sunday Telegraph featured a report that BT was 'poised to revolutionise the internet by offering totally free net access with no call charges'. 'Under the secret plans,' the report said, 'BT is expected to offer internet access using a 'freephone' number [...] according to City analysts, customers would pay only a marginal increase in the normal monthly line rental charge.' A day later, online news source The Register reported BT's dismissal of the Sunday Telegraph's assertions as 'pure speculation', and repeated BT's denial that it had been running any 0800 trials whatsoever. Whilst there were plans to change the structure of its services, the telco said, there were no specific plans to offer unmetered 0800 access. But the Telegraph got its report of the 'secret plans' from somewhere – perhaps from the same rogue element that released BT's 0800 number onto Usenet – and perhaps, again, from the telco itself. The day before yesterday, on the 25th April, an 'official' annoucement that BT was to offer unmetered 0800 access on the weekends through its BT Internet provider appeared in UK newsgroups, sending ripples of excitement through the UK net community. (Although the fact that it is already very hard to get a connection to the BT Internet service on the weekends, even without 0800 access, may indicate less cause for excitement than might first be supposed). Then the next day, in what was fast becoming a standard tactic for the company, BT nay-sayed this announcement as 'pure speculation'. So what was going on? Were we to finally get limited unmetered access or not? A BT Internet worker, perhaps frustrated at his company's attitude, revealed to me that although on the 25th he and his colleagues had been told that the announcement was 'official', leading them to make announcements on and offline, by the 26th they had been readvised that the 0800 access scheme was 'unofficial'. No-one should have been told about it, BT management said, and from now on BT Internet staff had to tell everyone that the rumours were 'pure speculation'. So, the 'pure speculation' appears to be that from June 5th (the day before, coincidentally or not, CUT's planned dial-up strike) BT will be offering freephone access to the Net at weekends only. This kind of last-ditch tactic rather smacks of a telco that may fear for the imminent departure of its consumer base – not from LocalTel alone, which seems unable to handle even the small amount of business that it has, but from the big media players who are all poised with their various digital offerings. No-one really knows the extent of the net consumer market in the UK, which has been held in a state of suspended animation by prehistoric metering policies, and that's a large part of the reason that no-one has as yet committed to a flat-rate system. But, as a recent UK study has shown, 41 per cent of households who are not using the Internet at the moment would be 'likely to go online' if per-minute phone charges were dropped. Those figures speak for themselves, and they won't have gone unnoticed by start-up operators looking to find themselves a client-base. BT's hurried testing and fluffed annoucement of an 0800 access facility – it didn't even have time to consult OFTEL on the matter - may well speak volumes about what's around the corner for the UK net community. Last Sunday's Observer suggested that OFTEL should 'force BT to stop being an Internet parasite', but it seems to be the market that has finally forced BT's hand, not the national telephony regulator, which was kept in the dark right up to the last minute and which anyway has no jurisdition over BT Internet, which will probably be buying its 0800 time at full price from BT. It will also be the market which will have other ISPs jumping to offer freephone services of their own, and – who knows – digital providers of all types finally stepping into the ring with their own offerings. A last it's possible to see unmetered access to the Net just around the corner for UK users. Step aside, OFTEL: the market's calling the shots from here on in. Text by Jamie King. First published in the online journal Telepolis.