Seems to work differently in the UK, most "Free" ISP's cost money..... i.e you
pay a fixed rate for unmetered access, say £10 per month and are allowed to
access what I suppose in the US you call a toll free number.
It's very much in it's infancy here, ISP's are starting up and closing down,
then re-opening with new rules such as cut-off times after a period of
connection, no on-line gaming etc.
I believe some of them use ads in IE but as I connect from Linux I don't
really know.
I think the main difference is in the way US & UK operate, historically we
only had British Telecom (now BT) who charged for line rental and all calls
both local and long distance, we now have 2 major ones and a number of smaller
ones. I understand (possibly incorrectly) that in the US there are a number of
telco's and the model is pay for the service and get local calls free.
Apart from AOL etc when the internet began to take off in the UK a number of
"Free" ISP's started up, the meaning of "Free" was that you didn't pay for the
service as you did with AOL, Compuserve etc, but you did pay for calls to a
local rate number. Now we have Unmetered Access which is not "Free" , with these
services you pay a fixed rate to the ISP but don't pay for the cost of the
call.
And then there is Surftime from BT which means you pay BT a fixed fee for
unmetered access and connect through an ISP who participates in the scheme
and may or may not charge for the service.
I hope someone out there understands this - I'm confused now
Poogle
On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, you wrote:
> The key word in this discussion is "Free". Regular ISP's work just fine, but
> free one's usually require you to run a .exe that displays ads while your
> connected. And since they don't make a Linux version of those ad programs, you
> can't connect to the free ISP.
>
> > I dont know what all this fuss is about, unless us isps work differently
> > than uk. All I had to do was enter the phone number, username, password, dns
> > and a few other things to get both my isps going on linux. apart from aol,
> > compuserve and msn, most isps should work with linux. The isp doesn't know
> > what os is connecting to it. What is this about?
>
> --
> Anthony
> http://binaryfusion.net
> Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
