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European Internet Users boycott telecom June 6 112

Posted by Hemos from the ain't-gonna-work-on-daddy's-farm-no-more dept.
troc sent us the the British strike site for this weekend's European Internet Users Telecommunications boycott. The boycott is over having to pay metered internet phone bills, which quite frankly, seems almost as silly as US crypto laws. There is also a site for the EU as well.
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European Internet Users boycott telecom June 6 More

European Internet Users boycott telecom June 6

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  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The infrastructure in the UK is sound. From www.unmetered.org.uk:

    'the UK's telecommunications infrastructure is one of the most modern in the world (and certainly more modern than that in the U.S. as a whole, where unmetered local calls are taken for granted!)'


    'BT is proud of the fact that it is the only national telecoms carrier in the world with 100% digital exchanges'


    'It is said that the cost of working out the duration and charge for local calls actually far exceeds the charge itself!'

  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by kju ( 327 )
    BT is proud of the fact that it is the only national telecoms carrier in the world with 100% digital exchanges'

    ...which is by the way wrong. Germany is 100% digital since end of 1997.

  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by kju ( 327 )
    The technology in Europe is often far more superiour than in US, because it is usually much newer and because this on a higher technical standard.

    But on the other hand technology is often more expensive in Europe, and sometimes not so feature-rich or user friendly, or the good features are much more expensive.

    This may sound like a miracle to US citizens, maybe you must be an European to understand this :-)
  • >That'd be nice -- problem is, as long as you're
    >using a modem and a normal phone line (or indeed
    >ISDN... ) you're being given a dedicated,
    >switched connection to the remote modem, which
    >is yours for the duration of the call, whether
    >you're sending data or not. If you're only using
    >it for IRC, that does not mean the rest of that
    >bandwidth is available for someone else.

    Bandwith != Ports, and n given as the Number of Ports: Total-Bandwith != n * Single-Port-Maximum-Bandwith.

    Yes, you are using your own dedicated port, but usually have not your own dedicated bandwidth, but the total bandwidth is shared between the ports, and is in total not the sum of all possible bandwiths on all ports. It is not unusual to have, say 90 ISDN-Ports with each 64 kBit, which sum up to 6 MegaBit fed by a single 2 MegaBit or even lesser Bandwith Line. At least here in Germany this is normal, as Bandwith is still quite expensive.

    If the phone calls to the ISP are free, the number of ports are expected to get a problem, as you need more ports. But there is one difference to the bandwidth problem: Adding a port is a onetime cost, which may possible be charged to the consumer.

    And this is the reason why a said, that merging the ISP and the telco in one company might solve the problem. Using a dedicated port in your local phone exchange should be much less cost than using a dedicated line from your home, over the exchange till the ISP...

    But i still believe, that ISP and Telco in one company is a very bad idea, as this will destroy the other not telco-owned ISPs.
  • I live in Germany, where i have quite expensive internet costs. The problem with internet is, that the current billing model is not exactly covering the costs i create.

    I think the phone call to the ISP should be free, and instead the traffic should be billed. The problem is, if im online for hours and do only low-traffic irc, im paying for these people who are online over a short period but are downloading Megs and Gigs of Data. And this is definitively unfair. I have to pay for all these persons who think that they need to download Episode 1 or other big files. For your knowledge: Episode 1 is worth about $40 to $100 of internet traffic, at least at the current prices in germany.

    But the big problem in billing the traffic and giving the connection for free, is that the ISP and the telco are usually not the same company, and the telco wants the money for the actual connection i make.

    If the telco and the isp would be the same company, i would only need a connection just to my local phone exchange, and the data would be flow as ip - and billed as traffic - beginning there.

    So the only way to free internet phone calls would be to merge the isp and the telco in one company, but im afraid this would also be the worst move, because in Europe and specially in Germany we have only very few telcos, and most telcos dominate their local area, so this way they would monopolize the internet access, which may be bad regarding the prices.
    1. Would it work in the UK? If not, why not?
    2. If it was technically possible, would would the government treat it as a phone call? (For tax and/or regulation purposes)
    3. What about cable access in the UK? Is that possible?

  • Posted by Forlife:

    Good for you, its about time some of the EU countries stood up for them selves.
    Why only a weekend, hit them where it hurts in the back pocket; make it at least a week to get the point across.
    Per minute charge, what do they think you are ..speed freaks..the internet should be enjoyed,not rushed...
    I'm online 24 hours a day, and I pay zippo...
    I think some governments dont get that by limiting the peoples access to the world it's like limiting a child's fundamental right for a semi-decent education while in his or her prime of learning.

    Show them who is in Control

  • Not true. If you use your phone 100% of the time, or never in a month the phone company still has wires out to your palce, a connection to their switch. They still print you a phone book. They still have to pay the technitions to keep your line running. Thus they still have to bill you even if you don't use it. The fixed costs for local calls (within the same siwthcing office) are higher then the other costs. Once you call between two switching offices they can share lines when you are not using it (this isn't a dedicated line form your house to grandmas in the next city, when you hang up someone else uses that line. More complex of course, but that is the gist)

    Yes it does cost the phone company more for someone who is on the phone 100% of the time, but it isn't particularry significant if you are not calling long distnaces (geography wise).

  • Agreed, to a point. Very few people talk 24x7. The unmetered pricing has to reflect this. However internet shouldn't be on the voice lines anyway (thats why we got xDSL - see the stories yesterday about this fake) and nobody talks 24x7. Telephone companies in the US are making money at the unmetered rate.

    Note, none of this applies to celluar as they cannot easially add more lines. Once the channels are used up they are used up and only a new phone can take advantage of the new lines. For land based lines adding more wire is cheap (relativly, it does cost big dollars but not when spread out over the life of those wires)

  • The regulatory system isn't *that* weak. A couple of months ago, when BT put down their ISDN prices, the regulator prevented them from making them lower. Why? Because the regulator is there to protect competition in the short run and consumer interest in the long run, rather than consumer interest in the short run.
    BT could happily (well, quite happily) offer free local calls now. Unfortunately, it would put *all* the smaller telcos (except maybe C&W) out of business because they couldn't compete with BTs economies of scale. By stopping BT from killing competition, they ensure the future of competition in British telecoms (as opposed to British Telecom).

    That's the theory, anyway :-)
    As it happens, it is getting better, slowly but surely. I am on C&W at home, and local calls are about 0.7p per min evenings and slightly less at weekends. They have a *naughty* trick of charging more for 0845 numbers than local calls, but any friendly ISP will give you a geographic entry number anyway. I also get dial-in from work, either on a local number or 0800 (free) if I'm dialing it to actually do something professional :-) Plus C&W have a nice deal going (apparently for ever, so they way) at the moment of maximum charge 50p for long-distance calls on Saturdays. It officially doesn't apply to data calls, but I don't think they've noticed yet :-) It's nice to see 1400+ minute calls going down for 50p on my bill. I effectively pay 2 quid per month for unlimited access on Saturdays. Since I have net access all day every day at work and unlimited access at home on Saturday, I'm pretty happy.
    Plus I've just found a free ISP with geographical numbers (the C&W 50p deal doesn't apply to 0845 numbers), which should allow me to cancel my Demon account.
  • Metering voice calls makes sense -- a switched system like the phones means that a circuit is in place and taking up resources even when no data is transmitted. Before modems, people had no reason not to hang up, the US telcos were OK making local calls free, but if everyone left their modem connected 24/7, the phone system would soon run out of switches.

    Now I get a pretty hefty phone bill for my Internet calls, so on a personal level, I'm eager to get a fixed monthly rate arrangement in place ASAP -- but I'm not sure free phone calls is the right way. After all, modems are crap (bad handshake times, bad latency), and the infrastructure is sure to be more expensive in the long run -- if everyone left their modem connected 24/7, it would effectively be the same as everyone having a leased line direct to their ISP. Why have a switched connection for each customer, when all they want is a packet-driven network?

    I'm scared that free local phone calls will stunt demand for *proper* home networking -- I don't care how the IP packets get where they're going, I just want an ethernet port somewhere in my house. The sooner nobody uses modems, the better. They suck.
    --
  • I think the phone call to the ISP should be free, and instead the traffic should be billed. The
    problem is, if im online for hours and do only low-traffic irc, im paying for these people who are
    online over a short period but are downloading Megs and Gigs of Data.

    That'd be nice -- problem is, as long as you're using a modem and a normal phone line (or indeed ISDN... ) you're being given a dedicated, switched connection to the remote modem, which is yours for the duration of the call, whether you're sending data or not. If you're only using it for IRC, that does not mean the rest of that bandwidth is available for someone else.

    I really hope that switched methods of connecting to the net die off, and in their place we get some form of packet-routing solution: cable modems are a good start. Then they can start charging by the byte, if they like, as far as I'm concerned: it might encourage web designers to cut down the size of those images....

    What else? A packet network would allow ISPs to start implementing the level-of-service aspects of IPv6, so those of us who want email and IRC could pay less than the people who want guaranteed 256Kb/s to some server during business hours.
    --
  • The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how
    many minutes you stay on the phone.

    Variable costs for the telephone company are determined by peak usage. They have to buy
    enough switch capacity and interoffice trunk lines to provide a specified quality of service during
    peak usage periods. Off-peak usage of the telephone system doesn't add to the cost of providing
    service.

    You don't need a degree in maths to see that since Internet calls are usually longer than voice calls (on an unmetered service), more internet calls means higher peak usages. On an unmetered service, though, the cost of meeting these peak demands gets passed on to the voice-only customers as well as the net users who are hogging the capacity -- pretty unfair.

    Kithran wrote: Well as I understand it local calls are unmetered in the US and the big question is why shouldn't they
    also be unmetered in the UK (and the rest of Europe).

    When the US Telcos introduced free local calls, voice calls was all there was -- and people didn't have any reason to leave a call connected for hours on end.

    I'll bet US telcos would love to go back to metered pricing now, but since the consumer is now so used to free calls, it ain't gonna happen.
    --
  • Aha! That's what the monthly subscription charge is for.

    There's a key point here - the price is not related to the cost to the supplier. The pricing structure is designed to allow the supplier to make a profit. For example, it's currently free to reconnect a telephone to BT if there has been service in the past at an address. Cost to BT: sending an engineer out to repatch, recommission line. Advantage to BT: new customer. The actual marginal cost to the supplier of the telephone call is almost zero (just the extra cost of electricity to drive a telephone in use) for local or national calls, assuming they own the cables etc.

    Usage based billing is just a different way of distributing the costs.

  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by scoof ( 2459 )
    "It must be true, I read it on the internet"

    This is complete and utter bull...we have several European backbone(provider)s, which we route through, and most countries have established a national IP traffic exchange (DIX in Denmark, LINX in London, AMS-IX in The Netherlands, and so forth)
    My statistics for the last 24 hours show that of the top 10 Autonomous systems we have exchanged traffic with, only one is US based, so please get your facts straight, we have, a telephone/IP infrastructure, which is at least as good as in US, if not better.
  • This is the case with many privatisations in Europe: a state monopoly company (be it phone, railway or electricity) is made private, but gets the whole infrastructure as part of the privitisation, making it extremely difficult for new companies to enter the market.

    Witness the difference between mobile and regular telephony. Mobile telephony is a fairly recent development here in Europe. As such, the former state companies are more or less in the same position as the newcomers. Here in the Netherlands, there are probably ten mobile phone companies, making it a reasonably effective market. For regular telephony, as a private citizen there is effectively still no other choice than the former state company. (And, as the state company is quite wealthy, it can afford to make a loss on services like mobile telephony in order to put competitors out of business. The regulatory body ( OPTA [www.opta.nl]) is putting a stop to some unfair practices and prices, but we're still a long way from a fully liberalised phone market.

    A reasonably popular alternative infrastructure for internet access and voice is cable, but it's not available yet in many places (because it needs to be rewired for twoway connections), and the cable companies are often cluefully challenged.

  • slovak telecom (ST) have guaranteed monopoly for voice connetctions and cables till 2003 (by law). and what's worse, they are trying to get another monopoly as ISP. maybe they are trying to secure theire position against foreign companies before they enter our market BUT they are doing it very ignorantly: they ignore existing infrastructure and existing organizations! ST acts like they are bringing internet to slovakia, like iternet is not here. for example ST hold an thumb on international connectivity (through ebone - second foreign-connectivity provider is telenor, which is slightly more expansive and has end-user-ISP interests too (it buys netlab ISP with 20% market share)), they are forcing customers to switch from analog to digital lines which are charged 2-3 more (even that cost asociated with digital lines are lower than that related to analog lines).

    there hase been one boycot of ST alredy - blocking of it's customers from a lot of web content. on first days ST just made some cracking/hacking (outside proxies, anonymizers, even attacks against web sites) - it shows they do not understand and they do not want understand nor solve problems they cause. and after all, no consenzus has been made with us.

    so there is petition organized to make a referendum to cut the law which guarantee them monopoly. for those of you from slovak republic ... viac informacii + peticne harky najdete na http://www.sis.sk/Referendum/ [www.sis.sk].

  • when i was in France i had sometimes 400$/month only for internet connection, i've decided to emigrate in Québec, now my local phone calls are free :o), but i pay 50% taxes on my salary :-(
    --
  • For example I like having my cellphone calls billed by the second. That way I can easily control how much the phone costs each month.

    OTOH I also like the non-metered ADSL-speed internet I have.

    The point being that instead of enforcing metering or not-metering there should be an option of both.
    --
    Pirkka

  • Here in Finland phone calls (esp. cellular) aren't that expensive, so it's not strictly US vs. EU.

    What pushed our prices down was a healthy competition that started about a decade ago.

    But still it's hard to get non-metered calls here. That's simply because there has been no demand for that kind of service until recently (and telcos are sloooow).

    The interesting thing is that not long ago US had the most powerful telco monopoly on this planet (the System, among friends) and boy did they suffer because of that.
    --
    Pirkka

  • British Telecom is kind of tied up in this regard due to the laws which were made when it was privatised in the 80's. Cross-subsidisation is not allowed within BT; this means that it no part of the company should be used to 'prop up' other parts; each part has to pay its way. If unmetered calls were used, this would have to either be cross-subsidised (against the laws) or have a much higher line rental which would probably be at least as expensive as line rental + calls.

    You get nothing for nothing; even if you get free calls, you'll still be paying more for line rental.
    --

  • They apply only to BT. You have a point about other companies, though; they could increase market share by doing this but in all likelihood, they would charge extra line rental to cover the extra costs since most (all?) customers taking this offer up would be the heavy users (eg, Geeks with modems or tele-workers).

    Like I said, you have to pay the companies somehow; might as well be through per-minute tariffs. Myself, I want to get DSL or a cable modem when I buy a flat :)
    --

  • the cheapest phone calls you are likely to find will be 1 pence per minute
    Not so; find the right provider, put that on friends & family (20% discount) and get premier line (another 10-20%, IIRC). The cost comes right down to about 0.6 - 0.7 p/m. Still adds up, of course. I remember in my MUDding days running up a 200 pound phone bill (about $300-350).
    --
  • This is not a matter of technical advancement. Actually, in my country (france) the whole phone network has been digital for about 4 years.
    The trouble is that most european countries have had a single state-owned telco for years.
    Even now, the benefits of competition are only visible for companies or people who make long distance calls. Practically the whole local loop in France is owned by France Telecom, and I bet that with the Internet boom local calls are more than ever one of their cash cows, and they certainly don't want to make them free.
    Even if they did, there's the problem of regulation authorities, as someone already said here, who prevent a dominant telco to make too aggressive moves that could hurt competition in the long run.
    It seems to me that the only hope for cheap broadband and unmetered Internet access in Europe is Radio LANs. Unfortunately, most interesting frequency ranges are forbidden and reserved for military usage...

  • Re: Cost (Score:1)

    by EJB ( 9167 )
    Well, mainly because until a short time ago all phone companies in Europe were state-owned and had a national monopoly.

    So they didn't have to be cost-efficient, and could request from the government that calls within the local-loops were also charged per-minute.

    Now the situation is changing slowly, but very few countries in Europe have a serious competitor for home phone lines to the former state-owned company.

    Maybe in a few years the governments will mandate free local-loop calls, but only when their stakes in the phone companies have been reduced further so they won't feel the decline in income from the profits of those companies.

    Of course it would be a popular move, so I can imagine that some governments will be tempted, especially when they come in a sitatuation in which their popularity is declining.

    Erwin
  • In Europe you pay a monthly fee. This fee is for the connection you have to your local phone exchange.

    The problem isn't calls withing the same phone exchange; there should be enough bandwidth within the exchange to connection every single phone line in the local loop *somewhere*.
    If an exchange doesn't have enough bandwidth for that, that's a design error. You're paying for it in your monthly bill!
    (Other things like dialing circuits used to be limited, but on a digital system this isn't much of a problem either; anyway with an Internet-call you'll only spend a tiny fraction of the time dialing)

    The long-distance connections between the exchanges are the problem, they have limited bandwidth.

    But the local exchange should be able to connection any local line line to any other local line for 24 hours a day, and it's already included in the monthly fee.

  • Your theory doesn't seem to hold; many providers in Europe do or did charge for the traffic, and while it did reduce traffic (I can tell, I've worked for companies with such connections) but it hasn't increased bandwidth.

    And it does reduce innovative use of the Internet and the economic growth that comes with it.

    In the United States, Internet metering has a very rare occurrence to my knowledge, and there are vastly bigger Internet connections than in Europe (the equivalent of a T3 in Europe is out of the question except for the biggest companies)

    For providers, there is an incentive to keep increasing bandwidth when customers pay a flat fee: more bandwidth keeps more happy customers.

    And the extra income generated by a new customer (startup fees, additional services, website design) is a lot bigger than the extra revenue from a metered service (and since most companies don't want to pay more for Internet than a certain sum, there's not likely to be much extra revenue).

  • Re: Cost (Score:1)

    by EJB ( 9167 )
    You seem to have serious reading-and-comprehension problems, pal.

    I was saying that they were less cost-effective.

    Not that I expected any better reading skills with your use of language.

  • Re:Cost (Score:1)

    by mpk ( 10222 )
    Power grids in Europe generally are more robust, as most countries have decent national power grids which do a pretty good job of distributing power where it's needed and spreading the load when one part of the network goes down - very few areas, at least, those with major populations, are fed by only one grid line. This makes for more robustness when power stations go offline or the lines come down, to the extent that major blackouts are very rare in Europe. It's kind of like internetworking, really - diverse connections and routing make for more robust networks. However, the topic digresses...
  • Yep we have wireless & cable (in places) and there are some over-powergrid trials running too.

    One of the key differences between the UK and the US is scale. We're pretty densely packed in, putting a lot of people within what would be a "local call". If local calls were free the telco(s) would lose a big slice of revenue.

    That and the fact that BT (British Telecom) has a near-monopoly on the 'phone network and the regulatory system is weak so it can charge what it likes.

    Things are changing, just far tooo sloooowly.


  • Dunno if I could last a whole week without checking email ;)

    Personally, I'm moving to the U.S. anyway to marry my fiancee so I guess then I'll be able to enjoy free internet access as well ..

    Even so, I'd love to see the U.K. get free local calls.. really crap without it.

    Diamond Cable in Leicester (where I live currently) DID have free local calls, but THEN started charging for ISP calls .. so altho local calls are free after 6pm, a call to your ISP costs you money... tightwads :/
  • Why should the phone companies give you something for free that costs them money by the minute???

    The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how many minutes you stay on the phone.

    Variable costs for the telephone company are determined by peak usage. They have to buy enough switch capacity and interoffice trunk lines to provide a specified quality of service during peak usage periods. Off-peak usage of the telephone system doesn't add to the cost of providing service.

  • Where I'm at, at least, local calls are unmetered no matter what service plan you're on through the phone company. In other words, it's low line rental & unmetered local calls no matter what. (It's probably the only thing I -like- about america... I don't like being associated with the rest of the genuine crap that goes on here... I think I'm likely to move up north to Canada eventually.)
  • From my experience, the phone infrastructures in France are as modern, maybe more, than those in the US.

    The current problem is the following: there used to be a state monopoly on all communications (now called France Telecom). This monopoly has been suppressed for long-distance calls (by simply pressing 7 instead of 0 in front of a long-distance call, you select Cegetel for instance). On the other hand, it will take a few years before concurrence for local calls.

    In the meantime, France Telecom is prohibited by concurrence authorities from breaking down the prices for local calls, for instance by proposing unmetered local calls. The reason is that other operators, newcomers to the marketplace, wouldn't be able to propose at first so interesting pricings.

    A recent decision said that, in the end, it could sale "batches" of 20 hours a month of local calls, for Internet use especially. The forecasts are that it makes France, which used to be one of the most expensive European countries for Net access, one of the cheapest.
  • Unsaid assumption: for any country X different from the US, from any kind of infrastructure Y, Y in X is of course more primitive than Y in US.

    :-)

    My own experience is that the power grid in the US seems to be more prone to problems that the one in Europe. I've never heard of entire French cities, with whole suburbs, put into the dark by an accident, while it happens regularly in the US, including in the high-teach areas of the San Francisco bay.
  • >In the US, Canada, Australia & NZ people have the choice of low line rental & per
    >minute charges OR higher line rental and unmetered local calls.

    Actually, I believe NZ just has high line rental and unmetered local calls. I haven't seen any options for low rental/metered calls, but then again I haven't really looked. But what do I know; I just live here ;-)
  • Why should internet calls be free? If you want unmetered access, get a leased line or get a cable connection or some other connection that's _designed_ to be connected 24/7. Your call uses infrastructure designed for phone calls of a limited length with only a small percentage of people involved in a call at any one time.

    Why should the phone companies give you something for free that costs them money by the minute???
  • Europeans and Brits are not being charged for -bandwidth- they're being charged -per minute-. This means they get charged the same to connect to the net at 56.6 (or as close as they can get) and continuously download .tgz files for an hour as they do to connect to the net at, say, 9600, and chat on IRC or ICQ or play a mud or mush or even read slashdot (with images off, of course.)

    Per minute charges do not have that great an affect on bandwidth usage - people will connect just long enough to download the big file they want and then disconnect again. What per minute charges do is make it ridiculously expensive to do anything interesting or informative on the net. If it takes you five minutes to read an online article, that's five minutes you payed for while using -no- bandwidth. (unless you're doing a download in a background process).

    And personally, I find it frustrating when a British friend tells me they can only stay connected and chat for twenty minutes because they have to conserve time to keep their phone bill down. I can imagine that those in that situation are much, much, much more frustrated.

    So, re-think your position, and try to address the actual issue.

  • I should think that 2 big factors cause US networks to have more reliability problems than Europe's:

    1) US networks were built earlier, as a result of a heavy-handed government push for rich-guy subsidized access for poor guys

    2) US networks are more spread out geographically, because the US has a lower population density. Thus, there are more vulnerable points.

  • Cost (Score:1)

    by warmi ( 13527 )
    Why is it so expensive over there in Europe ?
    I mean, the infrastructure can't be that far behind US.
  • As you say, media publicity is the REAL objective.
    Also if politicians can become involved etc.
    The sooner the local loop is "unbundled" from BT`s monopoly the better. A communal local loop has been proposed.

    A member of CUT - Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
  • In the US, Canada, Australia & NZ people have the choice of low line rental & per minute charges OR higher line rental and unmetered local calls.
  • With regard to ADSL
    BT (British Telecom) has 85% residential share of the market. ie Monopoly. As it was a state owned company until 10 years ago when it was privatised.
    By introducing ADSL it would shoot itself (and it`s share holders) in the foot. It has NO competition so does not need to offer ADSL.
    Leased lines cost atleast 10x in UK than US.
  • Yes Kingston still do unmetered calls, but only to their own ISP Karoo Extra. It costs £40 per month for unmetered calls OR £15 per month plus 6p per call (no matter the length).
    Kingston is owned and run by Hull county council and is about to float on the market.
  • That is what the Campaign is about. CHOICE
    We want the choice of unmetered local calls for a flat-rate fee. ie higher line rental
    A metered option would still be available and have lower line rental.
  • Sorry - but US long distance and indeed international calls are significantly cheaper than British Telecom national & international calls.
    Also it is often the case that Telco`s in the US are either solely a local provider or a national provider. THe Telco`s that operate as a local provider owns the local loop and are all profitable by charging either low rental + metered charges or a higher flat-rate fee for unmetered local calls.
  • You don't need a degree in maths to see that since Internet calls are usually longer than voice calls (on an unmetered service), more internet calls means higher peak usages. On an unmetered service, though, the cost of meeting these peak demands gets passed on to the voice-only customers as well as the net users who are hogging the capacity -- pretty unfair.

    I disagree peak-usage is during business hours. The Telco must have the required infrastructure to deal with thes peak-times, so usage during non-peak times incures no cost. Especially when using the local loop (not the non-geographical numbers we use in the UK which are national calls.)

    As to being subsidised by voice calls - you have the option of paying a higher flat-rate fee for unmetered local calls which includes VOICE calls.

    Also long distance/national& international calls in the US are cheaper than BT. So if they are subsidisng unmetered calls then BT are royally shagging us both ways.
  • I'm surprised that so many people in Europe are still using telephone lines. Isn't the European Infrastructure superior to the United States? I would image everyone there had xDSL or ISDN or Cable.

    This is because the European Telco`s were/are state owned and generally have large monopolies in their own countries = no competition = no need to introduce DSL ect since their customers have no where else to go...per minute charges=lots of profit for their shareholders
  • Sorry but that is utter rubbish. The campaign is not about universal unmetering (ie forcing higher line rental on every one). It is about having the choice of different tariffs which would be available in a competitive environment (which clearly their is not).
    We are campaigning for unmetered LOCAL calls, this would mean moving away from 0845 non-geographic no`s (charged at local rate).
    I assumed the price you pay is a bundled option with cable TV. The nearest Cable company to me is 100 miles. BT is THE ONLY choice.
    AS to ADSL & high speed access - WHY would BT introduce it? it has a monopoly & captive users for which it can charge what it likes.
    I agree that ADSL is inherently an unmetered technology but BT is dragging it`s heels.
    COMPETETION OR REGULATION is needed.
  • Just to let you know -
    CUT the UK organisers has already stated that any loss of profits will be unverifiable and therefore irrelevant to the boycott. Tee real objective is media and political coverage and awareness.
    In the UK it has been covered by all the computer magazines (PC Format, Amiga Format, Computer Shopper, Wired, PCW etc etc) by internet sites (SlashDot, CNet, ZDNet, BBC Online etc etc) by radio and TT and also the NewSPapers....with more to come tomorrow and monday
  • It's actually pretty bad here in denmark, and I can understand those that participate although I don't think it'll lead anywhere.

    When I used dialup a couple of years ago (thank God for leased lines), I had phonebills at about $1150 for 3 months. Ok I did use inet quite alot :)

  • Here in Denmark, it's cos one company sits on just about all the wire.

  • Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and scarce resources should be charged, to moderate demand.

    If everyone paid per byte for their internet access there would be almost no lag, because people would be more careful about their usage.

    And ISPs would have a direct incentive to provide better service, because being able to pass more traffic would immediately generate revenue.

    Don't be under the illusion that if we had unmetered phone calls in Europe, the telecoms companies would collect less revenue: it would just be collected in fixed charge not in call charges. The question of reducing telecoms' profits is entirely orthogonal to the question of whether the charge is a fixed one or a metered one.
  • >The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how many minutes you stay on the phone.

    Not true. If you have 100 customers who spend 5% of the time on the phone you need a lot less infrastructure than if the same 100 customers spent 100% of the time on the phone.

    It's more complicated than that. It depends on the traffic patterns. If a switch and trunks are engineered for a good quality of service during the busiest hour of the day, say 10-11 AM, an Internet user who stays on-line from 6-12 PM doesn't cost the telephone company a penny. There is a huge amount of underutilized capacity in the system because of the need to provide good quality of service during peak usage periods.

    An economically rational (this means that it will never happen) billing system would charge the subscriber a fixed rate for the non-usage sensitive components of the service, and a variable rate that would be based on the subscriber's use of the system during peak usage periods. Use of the system during off-peak periods would be free.

  • Kithran wrote: Well as I understand it local calls are unmetered in the US and the big question is why shouldn't they also be unmetered in the UK (and the rest of Europe).

    When the US Telcos introduced free local calls, voice calls was all there was -- and people didn't have any reason to leave a call connected for hours on end

    What should be noted is, that in the US and other places where local calls are unmetered, it still costs some money to the operator, which in turn gets this money from long distance users.

    This is called cross-subsidizing, and is considered evil if you want a fair competition for smaller companies which won't offer long distance calls.
  • Bah, next thing you know the postal service will start charging to deliver letters...
  • Basically internet provision does cost more in the UK than in the US - mostly because 90% of access involves going off to the US (directly or indirectly). UK internet companies pay for all these expensive transatlantic links to the US (US providers need far less international transit, and anyhow they can normally freeload on their peers). So there is a higher cost involved with UK connectivity which can only be resolved by having very cheap transatlantic or not needing transatlantic (one requires reducating the transatlantic carriers, the other means that all the required content has to be locally available).

    As UK connectivity costs more, and specifically has close to a per-byte aspect to it due to the non-UK traffic, the charging has to be different. Currently there are 3 ways of getting people to pay for internet:-
    1. Monthly fees
    2. Per second phone charges (the ISP gets a cut)
    3. Sell advertising

    Most ISPs use a combination with varying degrees of each. If you go to unmetered local calls then all this has to be paid for somewhere, so it will either be larger monthly fees (probably with usage limits) or enforced advertising - which often means that linux is not just unsupported but strongly discriminated against (because you clever linux users work round the advertising presentation).

    The UK is not the same as the US, so don't just assume US solutions will work there, and don't just think that someone else will pay for it - you need a fair and consistant charging model. I'm not saying the current one is that, but to succeed a replacement must both be reasonable for users and allow the ISPs to stay in business.
  • Kingston Telecom (the telco for Hull) got a bit of a shock a few years ago - they provided free local calls to their customers, then found that some of them were dialling up their Demon accounts and then leaving them connected 24 hours a day.

    Kingston were particularly miffed about this because the Demon PoP being called (this was in the days before single number access) was outside Kingston's network, so they were being charged huge amounts by BT and getting nothing back from their customers.

    I can't remember how this was resolved, now - whether Kingston put a limit on call length, exempted the PoP number, or whether Demon simply set up a PoP inside Kingston's network.

    Does anybody know if Kingston still do free local calls? Or indeed whether the 0845 numbers Demon provide now are exempt from such a rate? (they're not local numbers, after all)
    --

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  • Well as I understand it local calls are unmetered in the US and the big question is why shouldn't they also be unmetered in the UK (and the rest of Europe). When British Telecom lost its monopoly and cable compnaies started offering telephony some (videotron & nynex IIRC) provided their subscribers unmetered calls as one of their benefits. The offer only applied when calling another subscriber with the same company and in the evenings but seemed to be popular with both the cable companies (it attracted many customers) and with the customers themselves.

    It did not take long for ISPs to recognise the fact that if their lines were provided by the same cable company they would be able to attract a lot of subscribers. They charged slightly more than other ISPs but this meant they were able to afford to cope with the higher utilisation.

    The important thing to remember is that while a call stays within the same local area and within the same teleco's equipment the costs for a local call are minimal.

    Kithran

  • Free UK ISPs (Score:3)

    by Kithran ( 24643 ) on Friday June 04, 1999 @04:07AM (#1867087)
    Yes there are a number of 'free' ISPs in the UK and the number of subscribers are rapidly increasing. (Indeed I think Freeserve now have more users than AOL in the UK). There is still a big price differential between the UK & the US with regards to the cost of internet access.

    These 'free' ISPs in the UK are just no mothly fee - you still pay for the phone call to connect (indeed that is how these ISPs are funded they and the teleco split the revenue from calls). Given the fact the cheapest phone calls you are likely to find will be 1 pence per minute the bills soon mount up.

    I'm lucky enough to be with a teleco who provides unmetered calls to other customers of the same teleco - including my ISP and I pay 12 pounds a month for my net access. With a 'free' ISP that would equate to 20 hours a month. While that would be enough for light use (say email and a little casual surfing) as soon as you start making large downloads or spending more time online the savings with the unmetered model get more and more pronounced.

    I'd be interested to know what sort of percentage of US internet users are online for less than 20 hours a month....

    Kithran


  • BTInternet are allowing free calls for subscription paying customers, but only on the weekends, so I'm still boycotting this Sunday


    Goto BTInternet [btinternet.com] for more info....

  • The laws only apply to BT so there is a growing sector that rents bandwidth from BT at (Regulator fixed) wholesale prices, and resells it at (unregulated) prices that undercut BT even after the addition of a healthy profit.
    This is mainly done for international voice calls where BT has gone from the only provider to a minority player in the matter of a few years, while it still carries the vast majority of the traffic.



  • The problem is the local calls. In Germany, there are so many phone companies around, it's not even funny. In fact, long distance charges in Germany are now lower than in the U.S. Same with cell phones. (The idea of having to pay when someone calls you over a cell phone strikes Germans as at least as odd as the U.S. crypto laws :)

    No but they all have to buy their connectivity from the former monopolist; only a few have a few wires of their own. And hardly any of these wires cover the "Last Mile" into your home. So no matter where and what you call, you have to go through a monopolist's line for which a per minute charge applies. The margins those competitive carriers get in the end are miniscule, evidenced by the fact that long-distance calls are almost getting cheaper than local calls.

    As long as the former monopolies hang on to the local phone lines, I don't see anything happen.

    As far as this strike is concerned, there was one in Germany last November. The only thing I remember was people saying that the internet was never faster than on that day.

  • Pay by the minute internet access?
    Charging a person for the exchange of ideas, information, and creativity?

    Bah! The next thing you know, we'll be passing laws to limit the use of encryption and giving governments access to view emails. That'l be the day...
  • > If everyone paid per byte for their internet access there would be almost no lag, because people would be more careful about their usage.

    Firstly, this would also make terribly complicated phone bills, would the ISP have to give you an itemised bill of where your bandwidth went? (60MB download from www.x.com, etc)

    Also, when you talk about "metered" calls, what are you metering? Time? Bandwidth? A mixture of both? A long call takes up a modem slot, even if little traffic is downloaded.

    So, you can:
    a) meter on time, (like BT local calls)
    b) unmetered with a higher flat rate. (leased line)
    c) meter on bandwidth (eg Tele2 [tele2.co.uk] ,

    (With Tele2 you get a wireless link (arial goes into a ethernet card) You pay a flat charge a month, with an certain allowed bandwidth a month, charged for any overage)

    Personally I prefer the last option, a full time line, with a reasonable bandwidth allowance.
    The starting tarrif is £60 a month, for a 128K line, and 150MB a month, which is tempting, but a little too expensive. The more people that get into this sort of pricing model, the more competive it will be, and the more the range of tarrifs will suit the consumer.


    --
  • In most parts of the US, they do give everyone unmetered access all the time...and nothing's fallen over yet.
  • You can (at least in my area of SE Texas) can opt for Metered or Basic Service with SW Bell. Metered means a basic charge per "unit" and you get so many units per month included. For a little more, you can get basic service which is 100% unlimited local calling.

    Sprint, which controls a small region of the SE Texas area, has only Metered Unit service (Last time I checked ~9 months ago).

    So, It is here.

    RB
  • Metered telephone calls aren't just expensive in Europe. Most of Asia also has metered calls. Even worse, in a lot of countries, the telco is owned by the government. I have to pay $1US/hour for using the line. Fortunatly, there is a local PBX where I live. So I use the PBX for Internet cals, and it's all free. But I still have to pay by the minute on my direct line. I just feel sorry for the poor chumps who don't have the advantage of a PBX.

    But it makes sense, especially in poorer countries with old infrastructure. The telephone networks of the world were designed for calls which should last no more than 30 minutes. But Internet connections use the lines for hours at a time. And you guys in the States and Canada keep your telephone lines busy for months (i know i used to). This puts a lot of stress on the network.

    I'm surprised that so many people in Europe are still using telephone lines. Isn't the European Infrastructure superior to the United States? I would image everyone there had xDSL or ISDN or Cable.

    The REAL problem is that we keep trying to use the exsisting infrastructure for something it's not meant to do, in order to save money. This actually costs MORE and the users also have to suffer high costs and pathetic bandwidth. Hopefully the world will wake up someday to a SEPERATE, high bandwidth digital network just for the Net. No electrical sockets or cable TV jacks or telephone lines. Fiber optic for extreme bandwidth, copper for decent (100Mb/s) bandwidth and satalite for remote areas (100Mb/s?). Of course, it's unlikley to ever happen (except maybe satalite uplinks).
  • I live in British Columbia, Canada. Local calls are free, and long distance calls within Canada during off-hours have a cap of $20 CAN (that means that you never have to pay more than $20 a month for off-hours long distance). Off-hours is from 6pm to 8am.

    While at university, I shared a phone line with three other guys. In one month, we racked up 8000 minutes (yes, eight thousand) of long distance (and who knows how much local calling), and only ended up paying about $90 CAN (that's less than $60 US). That includes basic service, call waiting, four voice mailboxes, and long distance.

    Since the CRTC opened up the long distance market to competition, prices have become very reasonable. BCTel (now BCTTELUS after the merger with Alberta's phone company) has started giving really good deals on long distance, and local calls are free, as always.

    I can't imagine having to pay for local calls--it would totally change the way I use the phone. I remember seeing stats somewhere about phone use in the UK vs. US. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think phone use was at least an order of magnitude greater in the US. You poor Europeans don't realize how great non-metered local calling (not to mention non-metered long distance) is. No wonder you're so defensive about how good your infrastructure is. Does it really matter if you have all-digital exchanges if it's so expensive that you almost never use them?

  • There are an increasing number of "free" ISPs in the UK - they don't charge you anything, but they are tied in to a phone network company and receive a share of the call charge (which is typically about 1 penny per minute, off peak).

    The next development is likely to be a return to ISPs charging a monthly fee, but providing an 0800 (free) number for dial up. This can work because the cost to the phone companies of each call is so small

    So even if they don't make standard local calls unmetered, they will be unmetered for internet connections.

  • >The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how many minutes you stay on the phone.

    Not true. If you have 100 customers who spend 5% of the time on the phone you need a lot less infrastructure than if the same 100 customers spent 100% of the time on the phone.

    Roll on Voice over IP!

  • A "boycott" under the rubris that the product is "too expensive" is a tautology, and therefore ill-named.

    Clearly, if you don't want to pay so much, use the product less. Use the Internet at your office or school, and dialup less from home.

    The same silliness was tried in California wrt/ gasoline taxes, and marketed as a "media stunt." But boycotts and their associated media maelstroms only work if there is a real threat...

    ...such as cutting back on you Internet usage by a significant portion for some extended period of time.
  • Right - firstly get your own argument right.

    1 Free ISPs in the UK aren't sticking it to the consumer in any other way. The calls to the ISP I use (UUDial you'll know it as PIPEX Dial in the UK) cost exactly the same as those to Freeserve - the first free ISP.

    2 The costs of international circuits may be cheap but the costs of high speed circuits in the UK aren't. The typical maximum monthly charge for internet acces here is £10+vat (17.5%) a month. If calls to ISPs were to be unmetered there would be a far greater uptake of the internet and more people would stay online for longer - taking up more dial in lines and taking up more bandwidth - at the same time the UK consumer would be loathed to see price increases.

    3 The country's industry is not shooting itself in the foot. The country's near national telephony monopoly is keeping its market closed.

  • That is fine as long as you are the only one connecting 24/7. The phone system is desined for a small %age (say 5% for the sake of argument) of customers on an exchange to be connected simultaneously. If 5% of people connected 24/7 then nobody else would be able to make a call. So, if they gave everyone unmetered access all the time the whole system would fall over. Or alternatively cost the telco a huge amount of money to upgrade their equipment.
  • Can you really imagine a european government saying to a business (as they have almost all been privatised) 'You must *give* your product away' instead of charging for it.

    They might encourage/permit them to do it - AIUI, BT is not, as the dominant telco in the UK, permitted to offer unmetered calls - but I don't think there is any prospect of *the government* requiring it to be so. Competition perhaps - Kinston Communications in Hull already offer unmetered local calls to other KC subs.
  • Does *anyone* in the US have unmetered calls to their ISP *and* no subscription or usage charges from that ISP.

    I doubt it, otherwise how does the ISP cover their costs, let alone make any money.

    The US has unmetered calls, we have free ISPs in the UK. Everything falls over if you start offering both. We now have one ISP (owned by BT) who offer 800 number access to their sevice for a particular period at the weekend, *for a fee*.

    If you introduced unmetered calls to the UK, the number of homes having a second line would rocket, and *most* of those second lines would we on 24/7.
  • Just remmember that the US FCC is talking about the same sort of thing.
    I look at it like this: I pay each month for a pipe to the net, and I want to be able to use it for anything I want. Telcos don't like this because they aren't getting their 'fair' share of my money:)
    Also, look at AT&T. They are converting their ENTIRE network to IP because they know it's more efficient.
    As the data traffic to voice traffic ratio passes 50%, it becomes more efficient to make voice 'look' like data and to optomize the network for data then make data look like voice (i.e. a modem)..
    Just my two bits....
  • And France has been 100% digital even before that - they even claimed to be the first country with all-digital phone network.
  • The thing is - European are usually more suspicious of new-technology, so they don't jump on it at first sight. When they go for it the technology has gotten more mature and they get more up-to-date equipment. That's what happen with the cell-phones : the US started first, but now they have this loosy analog cell phones while all Europe is digital (GSM), because they started later.
  • 20 hours a month? I usually rack up that much online time in a day or two.
  • In the US, Canada, Australia & NZ people have the choice of low line rental & per minute charges OR higher line rental and unmetered local calls.

    Here in Aus I'm not aware of any option for metered local call charges. All local calls are charged at a flat rate of $0.25, though you can get lower rates if you pay a higher service fee.

    You can pick a different provider for distance calls, but afaik you have to stick with Telstra for local calls for now.


    --
    make clean; make love --without-war
  • I *cannot* believe you think that way! Do you actually work for BT or some other telco??? Even if you do, go to the CUT site (http://www.unmetered.org.uk/analysis/issues/from_ america.htm) You will see that rather than the UK calls being "cheaper" they are actually holding this country back. The writer of the article basically concludes by saying that unless something is done, the UK (and Europe) will become an economic backwater as the rest of the world surges ahead in the Electronic Age.

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