Then and Now

stormkeeper

BT’s Irish ISP subsidiary Esat Fusion sparked off protests after it imposed a monthly usage limit of 75 hours on its IOL NoLimit service which originally provided unmetered access between 6pm and 8am seven days a week. (Irish Times article). Esat Fusion sent letters to two thousand of its customers in late April advising them that, as they were using the service too much, they would be cut off as of today. No other unmetered alternatives were given, only a metered option.

All this has led to at least two campaign groups being created in Éire. First to get off the ground is Ireland Offline. It campaigns for unmetered, affordable access to the Internet in Éire for home users and small businesses, and grew out of discussions on the ie.comp newsgroup. A second campaign group is being formed by Urban Weigl to involve those cut off by Esat Fusion, but it has neither name nor Web site at the moment.

Given that Éire is selling itself as the 'e-commerce hub of Europe', and that the United Kingdom already enjoys unmetered telecommunications, we believe that the unmetered campaigns in Éire will ultimately succeed. However, success will only come after FRIACO-based wholesale unmetered tariffs, similar to those offered by BT here, are implemented in Éire. Esat Fusion has stated that its interconnect costs are metered and that, with a flat-rate Internet service, it cannot afford to subsidise heavy users whose interconnect costs exceed the monthly subscription fee of IR£20.

This is all very reminiscent of the United Kingdom situation nine months ago; it is sad but true that the global battle for unmetered telecommunications has to be fought and won country by country.


Hmm... I remember once being told by a Dutch friend of mine that Ireland is about 2 years behind The Netherlands.

Perhaps we can contact CUT and ask them for some ideas that will help us?

By the way, does anyone know anything about that second org that was meant to have formed?

http://www.unmetered.org.uk/news/news310501.htm

Tellox

depressing eh..
when I was 12 (2 years ago) I began programming in VB... I continued to program until nolimits reached its climax.. soon I couldnt afford to keep up with my group, they advanced without me, and they had no time to help me catch up. I began to buy books, but nothing I needed to know was covered in them.

Thanks to eircoms selfish ways, I had to drop one of my favorite hobbys

we have to stop this..

stormkeeper

I'm just after finding this:

http://www.unmetered.org.uk/news/news240299.htm

'Scam'? Rather, 'start' (24 February 1999)

John McCormac has passed on, before it is announced, the details of what Telecom Eireann are proposing (subject to regulatory approval) to give unmetered Internet access to users; there is also an Irish Times article.

The deal is that users can buy 100 hours of access for £25-£30IRL; the final price is not yet fixed. As the time of writing we don't know what time periods (daytime, evening, weekend or any combination of those) or whether or not more than one 'block' of 100 hours can be purchased in advance.

The announcement was trailed a long time ago and has been delayed two months; one can only imagine what sort of battles took place behind the scenes. Overthrowing fixed mental models is never easy.

John describes the terms as a 'scam', but we prefer to call them a 'start'. Going to unmetered access aux États-Unis (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) in one go would have been too much to swallow. What matters is that metering has been stretched from one minute to 6,000 minutes at least, and increasing anything by three orders of magnitude at a stroke doesn't happen often.

Very importantly, the Irish have realised that tiny increments of unmetered access are useless; we often see questionnaires in this country which suggest that more than eight or ten hours of Internet use a month is considered a great deal. 100 hours may fall far short of a whole working month, but that amount can only grow.

I agree totally with what you say Tizlox... I used to be on NoLimits myself when i was 17 (nearly 2 years ago) and it was around this time I had it. Funnily enough, I got cut off 3 weeks from this date and I've been struggling with metered calls ever since (and running up a couple of big phone bills in the process ) I'm thinking that most of SNL's customers may have been students, as it appealed to them in costs.

stormkeeper

I seem to be digging up loads of things on this CUT site... Take a look at this for example:

http://www.unmetered.org.uk/mythbusters/mythbusters4.htm

The following extract comes from a 1996 Channel 4 documentary entitled "Visions of Heaven and Hell". It is available in Real format, so you will need RealPlayer 5 or better to run the clip. If you don't already have it installed you can get the latest version free from RealNetworks.

If you can't view the video clip, here's a transcription:


'In the last fifteen years we've seen quite a revolution in the role of technology. Let me show you.'
[Brandishes a thick copper cable]

'The cable here, which is basically a 1930s design, is able to transport a thousand simultaneous telephone calls on copper-pair.'
[picks up a more modern cable, with the same diameter, but containing within tubes of smaller cables]

'From just thirty years ago, here is a cable that could transport ten times this number of talkers in ONE of these coaxial tubes. So not a thousand, but ten thousand in one of these tubes. And there are eighteen of them [in the cable of the same diameter]. So instead of a thousand telephone calls, it's ten thousand telephone calls times eighteen tubes, in about the same volume.'
[picks up an optical fibre strand which is so thin to be barely visible]

'Now what is really quite remarkable is this optical fibre. Now, thousands of these [points to the modern copper cable package] will go on one of these optical fibres. That's as thick as a human hair. We have installed in the UK three million kilometres of optical fibre. It is made from only 90 tons of sand. There is enough communications capacity on there [points to the single fibre he is holding] for every man, woman and child on the planet to talk twice over at the same time.'
Peter Cochrane, Head of Research, BT Laboratories, speaking on 'Visions of Heaven and Hell', Channel 4, 1996.

What more needs to be said?

This transcription seems to emphasise the urgent need for Fibre-Optics... I mean, with that sort of capacity, imagine what could be done...

dahamsta

Kennett, when you're quoting articles (or media pieces), please provide links to the originals if possible. Your posts are informative, but the committee and working groups deal in official circles, where hearsay is next to useless. If we can't point to original, authoritative references, we can't use anything you post. Well, I can, but I'm only the propaganda guy.

adam

stormkeeper

my apologies... i should have mentioned where i'm getting all of them from. i'm getting them from http://www.unmetered.org.uk/mythbusters/index.htm

dahamsta

Thank you sir.

adam