Dial-up suppliers

On 17/06/07, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: To be fair, this is probably their only choice. BT have withdrawn their Surftime product from 1st April 2007, and it is this that most ISPs used to provide you with unmetered access. (Were you dialing an 084404* number?) I'd be very surprised if you found any ISP still offering any fixed-rate packages that were not based on Surftime. The telephone network is inherantly charged on a usage-based method; surftime was provided by placing dial-up servers in the local telephone exchanges, so enabling transition to IP based traffic early, without having to send the calls halfway across the country to your ISP's data centre. I imagine this equipment costs a lot to maintain compared to the number of users it now has.. <http://www.serviceview.bt.com/list/public/current/Customer_Opts_boo/2-1246_d0e1.htm> Broadband is obviously the way to go, I'm afraid. But if you are wedded to dial-up, your best bet is to try and find an ISP with a geographic access number, and then try and find a calls package that allows unlimited calls and doesn't specifically exclude ISP numbers (the BT packages DO exclude them.) and doesn't have a F.U.P. that will trip you up either.. If it's simply that you want/need serial access to a ppp/slip server and currently use a modem/dial-up to accomplish that, then a terminal server could give you that locally, linked that to a standard broadband modem/router. (I've got an old iolan+ on my LAN that I press into service occasionally for exactly this..) You can get broadband for less than the ?14.99 you are paying now. For instance, my ISP prices starts at ?9.99 for unlimited broadband if you are in the right area. <http://www.ukonline.net/home/> (If you go this route, and wish to quote me - irrelevant at ukonline.co.uk - then we both get a month free.) If you have Sky TV, then you can get service for free! HTH, Rob.