More on European ISPs

Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 23:25:33 -0300
From: "Doug McCann" <mccannd@gov.ns.ca>
To: ccn-board@chebucto.ns.ca, ccn-ip@chebucto.ns.ca, mccannd@gov.ns.ca
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Another extract

Doug M

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ISPS <http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=FS&cat_id=22>
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Reuters: Free ISP Model Moves to Mainland Europe

The free ISP model which has swept the UK off it's feet in the last five 
months has moved south to France. FreeUk has teamed up with a French 
provider, Clarinet France, to provide the wider Paris area with free 
Internet access.

Plans are to roll the project out to the rest of France in the coming 
months but already there are 20,000 subscribers.

Since April, France has seen five new free ISPs emerge, most offer 56k 
access, email or pop3 accounts. Many more offer full ISDN lines.

The model works on the premise that the ISPs take a share of the profit 
generated from extra telephone calls. Internet charges in Europe are 
metered therefore profits are dependent on how long the user stays 
online.

Freeserve, pioneer of the free ISP model, now have more than 1 million 
subscribers while their nearest rival, Demon, have 250,000. Freeserve 
have been critisised for bad performance and lack of technical support. 
Just last week some freeserve subscribers had outage for over 60 hours.

Despite that, the model is set to sweep across Europe and will no doubt 
boost the amount of people online in Europe.

<http://www.reuters.com>

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