Free! Gloriously FREE!! Haha!! (IC24)

Member Name: roebuddy

Product:	IC24
Date:	11/02/01 (309 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free online time - AT :LAST; some of the problems logging on have subsided recently

Disadvantages: Probably not much time left for IC24, plus there may be some logging on problems

Lets see hmmm. I’ve been with IC24 for sooooo long now that I kinda have to rack my brains to remember how I got involved with them.

At the beginning
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It all started with the then ill-fated Screaming.net, which promised totally free Internet access (that’s no monthly ISP subscription combined with FREE calls to the ISP). The only downside was a change of telephone line supplier, else you’d still be paying for the calls through BT. However this service was much maligned in the early days – Ann Robinson and her chums at Watchdog had a REAL go at them when many hundreds of customers complained that they were continuing to be charged and that they could not access the service despite having changed telephone companies.
Needless to say I was put off completely by Screaming’s ‘free’ service.

This was about two years ago, and following on from then, several companies said that truly free Internet access would only be months away. AltaVista promised this in early-mid 2000, and had huge publicity on the news (Newsnight) and e-mail newsletter subscriptions numbering in the thousands. I was one of those subscribers. I got 3, before AltaVista’s research and development departments realised that their approach would not be effective enough for the number of users that expressed interest. [They had planned a completely free ISP, paid for by advertising alone]. It was a nice idea, and that’s all it’s proved to be – if there was any substance to it, you’d bet that it would have taken off already.


Towards the present – and no Clearwater in sight….
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So by the middle of 2000 it seemed that we Brits would NEVER get free ISP calls like they do in the States.

Not that surprising, as regular telephone companies in the States, the equivalent of BT, prov
ide free off peak local calls as standard! The leap to free ISP calls isn’t that big from there on. But with the £200/second behemoth that is BRITISH Telecom and with very few to have the American audacity to actually band together and COMPLAIN, there’s absolutely NO incentive for British Tossp*t to provide us with this service.

We seemed to be doomed to the typical liberty taking that huge corporates have with Britain – the promise that change IS on the horizon, but it takes an absolute EON to get there (if at all) with the money-grabbers milking us for ALL we’re worth. Just look at the car manufacturers as well!

But things seemed to take a turn for the better in late summer last year, when I witnessed funky purple pairs of female … um …. eyes …(as well as the rest of her pretty face) against a black background on barely believable adverts. IC24 was the ad, and the logo was in them eyes… owh Aye they waar… OO Arrr! >>squaaawk<<


IC24 – the first ISP with Free time online.
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I really could not believe this, and let the ad pass about twenty times before coming to the conclusion that ‘getting the CD can’t do any harm’. So I dropped into my local Esso station where the CDs were being dished out, and haven’t looked back since.


The much-maligned setup
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If you read a few of the other IC24 opinions, you may come across nicks and knacks about how people didn’t realise that the initial Internet Explorer Setup right off the IC24 CD ISN’T actually the 0800 service. Sure enough that’s true.

But I really think that’s more of an indictment on the idiot that was sucker enough not to read the fine print! Once you go through the on-screen instructions provided by the CD and you log on for the first ti
me, one of the first things seen was on the IC24 homepage was the link to 0800 access. I can’t damn a person hard enough if they were fool enough to think that such an unbelievable service would come so easily.

Clicking on this link downloads a very small automated IE setup file. When you clicked on this, a few config files in your Internet Explorer files are altered, meaning that the next time you restart IE, your default ISP will be ‘IC24 for Free’ (as opposed to IC24).

I read somewhere that one dooyooer got a huge bill because they didn’t set up the 0800 service. And while new ‘IC24 for free’ users will be a rare breed in the days to come, I really can’t emphasise more that in the long run, this was a minor (and it is only minor) inconvenience and only affected you once.


Day-to-day usage
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Right from the offset it was made clear (on the adverts, CD cover and IC24 home page) that you did not have the free reign of normal ISP’s with regards to times of use. IC24’s 0800 service was initially restricted to 8pm to midnight on weekdays, and 9am to 5pm on weekends. That was 36 hours of free online time per week. Certainly more than adequate for my needs, and I had no problems with that, considering I worked for most of the hours when it was not available.

Outside these hours, dialling the 0800 number gives you the familiar female BT voice saying that the service is not available currently.

The Phantom Menace
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So once set up, what was the service like?
Well, it became immediately obvious that logging on may be a bit of an epic struggle. Initially it seemed as though this was a real fly-in-the-ointment – the first time I tried the 0800 service, I think I was trying at around half past eight in the evening. With experience I now know that the best times to log on on weekdays is punctually on
the hour – that’s when there telephone hubs have free routes and (after 8pm) it’s when people are forced out. For now is where one of the most important aspects of ‘IC24 for free’ is revealed – that you can only have one hour at a time!

This is more an inconvenience than a problem, because often you can log straight back on after your hour is up – it was a course of action taken by the ISP purely due to the popularity of the service and the need to allow all users to have as much opportunity to use the service as possible, while restricting abusers.

What may be of slightly more concern is the connection speeds you attain. You always seem to get somewhere around 40,000 and 43,000 bps. While this is not diabolically slow, you never seem to get the regular 55.6 kbps that you do on other ISP’s like Claranet. Ironically though, downloading mp3’s (say a 3.6 meg one) takes a lot less time than either of my other regular (lo-call rate) ISP’s: JungleLink and Supanet, despite the fact that they get connection speeds higher than IC24.


What about technical support?
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I have NEVER needed technical support, and I think that the rates they charge are ABSOLUTELY ludicrous – they are taking the p*ss, as all such premium rate lines do! P”ss may be too strong a word. Advantage is certainly more appropriate. Any such premium rate line takes advantage of the user. Whether it be a poor fool whose computer has them stumped, a sad b*stard who can’t face the opposite sex and reverts to a chat-line, a pathological mobile phone user that absolutely HAS to have the latest ring tone or graphic, or the spoilt brat that desperately wants to enter the phone compo to win that dream console.

Is it too hard to read up on how these ISP’s work? Is it too hard to read the fine print? Is it too hard to read the online or windows inst
ructions? If you’re not a good student, then why not just ask a friend? Why do you have to give these parasites even more money? Listen, I’m all for IC24 and the service they provide, but I have no sympathy for people that think technical support lines are good – they’re just lazy and if you wanna give up your money for your own shortcomings, then that’s your problem. [I’ve worked in technical support, and some of the most basic questions that people ask …. Grrrrrrrr.. I had to leave just for the sake of my blood pressure!]


The hub, the hub
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There’s no doubt that the concept of an ISP with free online time is one that would interest EVERYONE, yet I don’t feel that IC24 would be everyone’s cup-of-tea. There are a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that it can be difficult to log on.

To give readers a better idea of the difficulty I’ll give you an example – that of moi. I have a base in North West London – here there is a relatively high population density, meaning that the telephone hubs in the area are fairly intricate and extensive. Logging onto IC24 proved far less troublesome here – on an average weekday, you could get on in about three attempts. On a busier weekday it could take up to thirty attempts – this might seem a huge amount, and may be indicative of someone with a lot of patience or just dogged determination. But in truth I used a ‘robot’ – Go!Zilla download manager can automatically attempt ISP log on for you (read my outstanding op on that for more info) and only through looking at its log did I realise that 30 (rapid-fire) attempts were needed before success.

My other base of operation is outside of London in Radlett, Herts – a much more rural and less densely populated area with a less extensive network of hubs. The telephone hubs here also have a hugely annoying
feature in that if you attempt to call a line and are unsuccessful more than four times in less than two minutes, then you are barred from phoning that number for 5 minutes! This renders a robot like Go!Zilla useless in those intervening five minutes. More than that, if the robot is continued to be used in those five minutes, a signal is sent down the modem which re-bloody boots your computer! That can be hugely damaging to the structure and contents of your computer. So unlike in London, you have to manually keep an eye on your logon attempts to IC24. :-/

That said, no matter where you are in the country, it’s a lot easier to log in on weekends.

IC24 isn’t for everyone
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Judging by all this experience that some of you may perceive to be negative, you may ask yourself why I have persisted with it. Since ‘IC24 for Free’ came into existence, I very rarely used the Internet on weekdays, and more importantly wasn’t addicted to Dooyoo. On weekends I would download mp3’s, software updates, and patches for games, as well as entering compo’s, sending e-mail and having to do research for Uni.

So I’m by no means a very light user. Light users may as well bypass all the inconvenience and use the regular IC24 service or any other ISP that provides internet access with no monthly subscription, just phone call charges at local rate. That’s more than adequate for e-mail purposes.

Through IC24 I reckon I’ve become a fairly heavy Internet user. Online death matches became a reality for me without having to worry about charges. Mp3 downloads don’t hurt as much neither did 80 Meg patches for Half-Life.


It’s all about the Moh-nay!
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Once you get over the idiosyncrasies of ‘IC24 for Free’ I find that it is the BEST option for me. I’m not SUCH a heavy Internet user t
hat the new BT Surf time packages would be worth my while.

All in all, my BT line rental costs 30 squids per quarter. My total call charges vary from 50 – 60 pounds on top of that. I think that if I paid for BT Surf time (tenner a month), then my bills would never reach the lows that they sometimes do at the moment, and the would on average be the same as my highest recent bills.

One of the pleasing things to my eye is the extreme reduction in Internet calls exceeding 2 hours in duration – this is all thanks to IC24, which has definitely made a positive contribution with regards to economy. And the longer this 0800 service is continued, the more I can benefit.


So when the hell is the last day of IC24 for Free?
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IC24’s free 0800 service last summer was touted to last until 31st October 2000. But thankfully there have been numerous extensions to this deadline for the cessation of the service. Firstly there was an extension to the end of the year, then one to the end of January, until finally (probably the last) extension to the 14th February.

You can only assume that the sheer popularity of the service has made IC24 think again about stopping the service. In truth I think they are slowly trying to wean us off the service. The January extension was accompanied by a reduction in weekend free hours, with ALL days of the week now having the 8-midnight service. [It’s nice to know that some suppliers of addiction are trying their damndest to ‘cure’ their followers gently …… UNLIKE DOOYOOO ….. ahem …. <<sniff>>. … <<oh, the anxiety!>>]

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*** UPDATE ***
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IC24 is still working, and it's the 15th of Feb ....... Long may this continue (Along with Liverpool's success in Europe after THAT result over Roma!!! :-)

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Regular users like myself have recognised the best times to log on and thus get the best out of the service, and once it goes, IC24 will leave a gaping hole in our online lives, with other related consequences too.

The loss of IC24 may mean the loss of appetite for Dooyoo …… maybe not :)
[May Dooyoo never end]

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