Unmetered internet services, which let you sit online for hours at no extra charge, have had a bad press recently. Nonetheless, there are several services with satisfied users, and I'm a very happy user of two of them: BT's Surftime and Telewest's Surf Unlimited.
I'm happy because I have had no problems connecting with either service, and the Telewest connection is particularly quick. Better still, I'm paying less for internet access than I have for years. My British Telecom phone bill has plunged from £350 a quarter in July 1998 (and that, sadly, was not a record) to just £72 for the same quarter this year.
That is not the whole story, because some of the costs have shifted to extra lines and mobile phones. We used to have one line for three people, whereas now we have four lines - two BT lines, two Telewest lines - and three mobile phones. Well, my 15 year old son runs a couple of websites and my wife has friends. But even adding up all the bills, we're still spending only half what we used to.
BT Surftime, announced in March, provides unmetered net access in the evenings and at weekends via an 0800 number for £5.99 a month on top of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) charges. We use BT Internet, but the Surftime package is now available from other suppliers too. Demon has just announced "Premier Connect, our BT Surftime offering".
BT has also added an Anytime version of BT Surftime, which provides unmetered internet access 24 hours a day for £19.99 a month. We had already signed up for Telewest's similar SurfUnlimited, announced in February, because we already had cable TV and two Telewest phone lines.
Telewest charges £9.99 a month for SurfUnlimited, but this includes the subscription to Cable Internet, which was £11.75 a month. I also have to pay for a Telewest line rental and make at least £10 worth of voice calls a month. That is not a problem in our house. Other cable networks, including NTL, may have similar deals.
The surprising thing about Surftime is not that it is cheaper but that it changes the way you use the net. Instead of planning surfing sessions in advance, and getting offline as quickly as possible, you start to look for things to download just so you can stay online.
Because one drawback with most "always on" services is that they chuck you off if they don't detect any activity. In fact, BT chucks people off after two hours whether they are in the middle of a file download or not.
I used to be a super-efficient surfer. I'd draw up a list of websites I wanted to visit and mail it to my Yahoo mailbox. Mailing a plain text message of correctly-formed addresses (including the http://) to Yahoo turns them into links. Then I'd go down the list, clicking the links to open all the pages I wanted. I would sometimes open 30 or 40 then close the connection to read them offline. (Yahoo doesn't load external pages in frames, so if you're still using Hotmail, switch.)
When downloading files, I'd always use GetRight. This is the best of several utilities that can pause and resume downloads - as long as the server supports resuming. With GetRight, I used to pause slow downloads and continue them later when the net was less congested. If the connection is dropped, GetRight can redial automatically and carry on. It is still a good idea to use GetRight with an unmetered connection, but it doesn't cost anything when downloads fail.
An unmetered internet connection is also an open invitation to download short movies from AtomFilms, to listen to music at www.spinner.com and play games http://zone.msn.co.uk. It lets you watch the world through a webcam at www.camcentral.com or even pick up a Big Brother feed (use http://bbukhurl.real.com/ramhurl.ram?file=bbenc1.rmto6.rm to avoid the Channel 4 website). When cost is not a barrier, neither is pointlessness.
SurfUnlimited-type deals may not only change what you do online but when you do it. You don't have to wait for cheap rate phone charges to start; you don't have to wait for the homework rush to subside, usually at about 10pm. You may even be able to surf in the mornings: the net is quicker when the kids are at school and America is asleep.
Some companies, such as LineOne, are retreating from unmetered services because they are uneconomic. The problem, said one spokesman, is that too many people stay logged on all the time.
That's probably inevitable to begin with. Like a child in a chocolate factory, I logged 27 hours online during BT's first "free" weekend. But after a few months, the novelty wears off. And SurfUnlimited means I no longer feel obliged to do things for free on Sunday night when they are still free on Monday morning.
In fact, for the first time in years, I can now get through most of a weekend without hitting the net at all. That's not what I expected from an "always available" service. Maybe there's hope for me yet.
