ic greed (IC24)

Member Name:

Product:	IC24
Date:	01/06/01 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none anymore

Disadvantages: far too much unacceptable downtime

An email received today (31-05-2001) from ic24, the Internet Service Provider from the HUGE Trinity Group (which includes cable TV stations, the Daily & Sunday Mirror, The People and a multitude of free and pay newspapers up and down the country - as well as overseas interests) have indicated that their free 0800 internent access offer was to end after around a year in one form or another, citing the service cannot be sustained.

Here's the email (with my commentns after it) -


Dear IC24 User

Internet access service trends have gone through some of the fastest
transitions of any customer service in history , and this continues today. It
is clear now to all UK Internet Service Providers that providing free
telephony service hours as well as free access services cannot be sustained
indefinitely, and we at ic24 are no exception to this - all good things must
come to an end. And, unfortunately, our pioneering 'After 8' campaign must do
just that. On Thursday May 31st our free online time promotion will end.

Of course, we will continue to operate our acclaimed 0845 'pay-as-you-go'
service and should stress that our 0845 service is completely unchanged and
still very much available. As you may know , this service is the basis of
ISPA's ISP of the year for 2000

We know that most of our customers will find that our 0845 / pay-as-you-go
service is still the most cost effective way for them to access the Internet
and our 0845 service will continue to provide the high levels of performance
availablity and reliability that you have come to expect.

We are currently developing a series of unmetered, unlimited use telephony
packages, and will advise you of those within the nect 7 to 10 days.

We'd like to thank you for using ic24 to date, and hope that you will continue
to enjoy and benefit from a truly great service.



So, it's a truely great service, is it? I'd have to disagree. Since I first went online, I have used several ISPs (I think it's rather wise having a backup ISP in case your regular ISP is 'down') and the most unreliable (after the scam called 4uNet) was ic24 with multiple problems which take a long time to resolve. Tech staff do not know the difference between an ISP and a bumble bee and there is no way I'd trust them to turn over the channel on a television than trust anything they suggest for problem solving. That is, when they reply.

The true reason for axing the free service (which has such poor bandwidth that more often than not, no connection can be made and so you use their 0845 'pay' dial up instead. ic24 gained a lot of new custom when they introduced the free dial offer but now, I can forsee people ditching it as noone wants 0845 access anymore. Perhaps if ic24 had it's unmetered deal in place (or a close start date) then it wouldn't be so bad for the users - and for the company as they wouldn't have to look for new customers again or try to win back the old ones.

As for the web site itself, it's a rather boring effort which could do with a complete overhaul to make it more user-friendly and attractive.

One thing to bear in mind with ic24 is that, although you can receive email through any ISP, only with an ic24 connection can you send email (for some unknown reason ic24 email can be sent with a Liberty Surf connection). This is so that you must pay ic24 to send the mail.

If all ISPs were 0845, then I would still consider using others before ic24 due to the vast amounts of downtime they have. I have one of my web sites hosted on ic24 and, apart from poor bandwidth, has had several periods of downtime that can last for several days WITHOUT a curtesy email to state it's down. That wouldn't cost them a cent to do. Due to the amount of users who have
bookmarks and so on for this site, I am reluctent to move it elsewhere and file transfer is easier to ic24 than a lot of other ISPs servers.

Thumbs down, then.

Summary: