Internet Access: The Cheapest Way To Dial-up Article Discussion Area

SirEcho

I have Virgin Broadband at home and can usually connect to someone else's BB or wireless when away, but have no connection when staying with elderly parents. I'm normally content to be incommunicado, but recently missed a couple of important messages and decided to rectify the situation. My brother-in-law's much-envied £5/month mobile broadband from Virgin would have been £30 to set-up and £8 a month thereafter to me ...then I remembered dial-up! Only 6p/minute, 24 hours a day from them.

I spent literally hours trying to set this up. 4 phone calls to them got me nowhere ...and I'm sick of hearing the same recorded message about new HD TV channels. The upshot was that I would need to call their dial-up tech people ...at 50p/minute. No thanks.

Then I found the reference to free-dialup.net here. That took about a minute to set up ...and its working.
Price?
4p / minute during the day, 1.5p evenings and a penny weekends.

Many thanks for the tip ...and stuff you, Virgin!!

clothahump

Could somebody please explain why fast4 are being advertised on here when they do not provide a satisfactory service? I followed the link yesterday thinking it would be a reputable company, signed up and then spent the next 10 hours trying to connect to their steam driven server, after calling their help line I listened to their server status message which stated they have been having problems for weeks.
I have informed Trading Standards and I seriously hope they end up in some serious trouble.

Thanks for nothing moneysavingexpert.com I will not be recommending your website to anybody else from here on in.

equivalent

From the fast4 system status page (members/'home'): 13/09/2010 - Subscription Dialup Fault: UPDATE There have been extended problems affecting the dialup platform of late and we apologise for the time taken to see a resolution to this: problems of the line being busy as the connection number is dialled or 'invalid username or password' prompts as the connection fails are related to faults within our suppliers network. We use a third party supplier to provide the initial freephone number routing from the BT exchange to our own network - this network is known as a FRIACO network - where we can then authenticate your session and provide you internet access: routing problems seen by our supplier are why diaup users have had problems recently with connection. Due to the length of time our suppliers have had but failed to resolve this problem within we have recently signed contracts with an alternative supplier; as a result of this we should be able to assure customers of a fully working service again by later this week. A new number is likely to be required however and we will confirm this when we can through our status line (0870 225 1055) and here on our system status page.

clothahump

So what exactly is your point?

equivalent

No point (just more information, that's all - I thought that was obvious). Haven't you made yours already? It's not my fault, you know!

equivalent

Re: fast4 unlimited dialup: New number up on fast4's status page now (at last!), and it works.