Does anybody remember FREE dial up internet ?

Grumpy_chap

MouldyOldDough said:

I have a memory of TOTALLY FREE dial up in about 1997

How did they run the business at a loss ?

How did it work ?

It was not a "buy 60 minutes for £x" scheme - it was totally free on a freephone number.....

I don't just remember it - I still have the same e-mail address from those starting out days.

brewerdave

I think I can remember  a "free" internet service in the mid 90s, from xstream on an original 14400 bps modem installed in my Win95 PC - NOT sure whether the phone number it dialled was free or 1p/min - long time ago !!!

JaneDoeJohnDoe

Certainly do remember... BT had a free number for x amount per month or Payg number.
However I do recall at one time a system glitch that let me dial the free number & on the payg account!

Lorian

Neil_Jones said:

Lorian said:

Freeserve were the big name

Freeserve was the first "free" ISP.  No subscription charges, just pay for the calls.  A major market changer from the AOL/Coumpserve days when it came along.

I still have my CompuServe membership box and discs.

jshm2

Sure, AOL CD's on magazines (which I used to buy before going Zinio instead) used to give free dialup. Think it was something like 60 hours. the "trick" was to use a different email and different username, before the card got charged. That way you got free internet. Pain in the !!!!!! was that you had to download and reload the contacts on the AOL chat program - unless you used Yahoo or MSN Chat.  

Jumblebumble

Dont so much remember how dial up worked but do remember our first ADSL with the frog and 512Mb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQy_0TaGBkk
Very quick way to get viruses if you weren't careful
Them me moved house and Pipex gave us a 2MB connection but did not bill us for 2 years and then only billed back 1 month when they finally caught up
The ultimate in customer service

bob2302

IvanOpinion said:

I don't remember free internet,

It never existed. We always payed for it in some way: through a subscription or as a phone service.

onomatopoeia99

There was a service that provided an 0800 number with no monthly fee but you had to run their software that displayed adverts while you were connected. I think it was called X-stream. I tried it and it was completely hopeless, nothing ever loaded.

forgotmyname

AOL free trials and then a free AOL account, so paying for the internet came as a shock when carphone warehouse
bought them out and promptly killed it.

AOL paid for my broadband install which had to be done by an engineer back then with the wallplate splitter not the
later plug in splitters.

I switched to O2 and downloaded a lot the first month and they said their was unlimited and there was taking the P...
These days with 4k content many probably download more in a single day than I did that entire month.

M25

I think redhotant.com whose former boss ended up in jail were the first to offer unlimted Internet for a yearly fee (£130).

IIRC you had to disconnect (or were disconnected) after 60mins which I remember meant you could only download about 25mb in that period. I think their connection rules relaxed quite a bit as they got more popular.

It was horrible looking back but it was a revolution which opened the flood gates for the UK market.

I remember my local library charged 50p per hour and the librarian would wheel the computer out from her office. Roughly 1995 I think that was.

The 0345 dial-ups were quite good.