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Hasta la vista free AltaVista
September 2000
After initiating the UK scramble for free ISPs,
AltaVista fails to deliver.
One of the big news items for Internet delivery
in the UK in the first half of 2000 was free services: not merely
not paying an ISP (that was old hat), but free phone calls as well.
This is common enough in the United States, where free local phone
calls provided one of the conditions for the Internet boom in the
late 1990s, but for something similar to happen over the pond promised
a revolution.
The company at the forefront of that revolution
was AltaVista, which, at the beginning of 2000, revealed that it
was considering rolling out a service that would offer unlimited
free access (including phone calls) in return for £60 per
year. By August, the offer had collapsed without a single subscription
with calls for heads to roll, such as that of Andy Mitchell, AltaVista's
UK Managing Director who went on holiday just before news of the
about turn was released.
While many potential subscribers and commentators
were furious, it is easy to sympathise with AltaVista's dilemma
(though not with the company's chutzpah when it came to hyping their
service): the company claims that BT did not come forward with a
fixed fee service, meaning that AltaVista would be responsible for
potentially limitless costs while only drawing back £60 a
year from subscribers. The notion that any other deal was on offer
was angrily denied by BT, and has been confirmed by most other commentators,
but the pressure is now on for BT to provide fixed cost services
so that unmetered access can take off in the UK (as BT offers itself
with SurfTime). Nor was AltaVista the only company to renege on
the deal, as LineOne also announced this month that its free phone
service was to end for similar reasons.
But unmetered access is not dead yet. Services
such as SurfTime (www. surftime.co.uk)
and 24-7 Freecall (www.24-7freecall.net)
offer unmetered usage for £19.99 a month, and other services
include Freeserve (www.freeserve.com)
which charges £120 a year or £10 phone calls a month
or Red Hot Ant (www.redhotant.com)
for £40 but which cuts off sessions after three hours. As
these and others demonstrate, we haven't quite got our free lunch
yet, though we may at least have entered the restaurant. However,
as Nicholas Lansman, secretary general of the ISPA commented as
AltaVista's service failed to materialise, 'When you try to get
something for nothing, quality starts slipping. How can companies
provide a service for free? The answer: they can't.'
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