Anytime - no frills, good price (Freeserve)

Member Name: Retron

Product:	Freeserve
Date:	31/07/01 (51 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: 2 hour cutoff

As one of the first members of Freeserve Unlimited, I enjoyed the benefits of being able to connect to the Internet whenever I wanted, all for 10 pounds a month (and as a student living at home, that was quite a lot of time). Freeserve have discontinued that scheme now, in favour of Freeserve Anytime. The cost is now 13 pounds a month, and you don't get 10 pounds of free calls thrown in any more.

However, you're no longer routed through Energis via an 0845 number - instead, you're given an 0808 number which uses BT's FRIACO. This will hopefully mean Freeserve won't be making a huge loss for every member, so won't pull the plug any time soon.

As for the service, it's decidedly average. It works - I rarely get an engaged tone, the mail and news servers work for most of the time, and the two hour cutoff remains exactly as before. There aren't any special frills with Freeserve - it's not set up for the technical user in the same way Demon is, for example. The news server has good article retention, and carries most of the main binary groups. I've had a few problems with packet loss (everything grinding to a halt for a minute or so), but for the price I can put up with that. I've not had to use their technical support, and at 50p/min, I certainly would want to - providing you can get online, Freeserve's own help pages are pretty good, informing you of DNS settings and the like.

Overall, for my use (Internet access during the day), it's worth its weight in gold - paying 40 pounds a quarter is a lot better than paying 80 or 90 as I did before.

Summary: