Net access: limiting the unlimited

Two interesting bits of news emerged from the land of unmetered net access yesterday.

VirginNet announced that it's delaying the launch of its unmetered package.

LineOne - the ISP part-owned by BT - said that it was scrapping its offering altogether.

Virgin claimed its decision was down to technical teething problems, which it hopes to resolve.

LineOne said it was shutting down the offering because pesky users keep logging on and stay logged on for long periods of time, which severely limits capacity.

Is this a case of smoke and mirrors? Could be. It's been said for some time that while these unmetered access packages are great for you and me, they're not so good for the ISPs themselves.

Why? It comes down to hard cash. It's not easy for anyone having to piggy-back on BT's backbone to make money from unlimited net access.

Even a LineOne spokeswoman was quoted as saying that its service was commercially and financially unviable.

There's advertising revenue, minimal interconnect fees, and that's about it - unless you levy substantial subscription costs, which the current batch of ISPs are reluctant to do: AltaVista's £50 annual fee is hardly exorbitant, but it is higher than originally intended.

And there are too many players in this market for them all to scrape a living together - at the last count, there were more than a dozen packages on the market.

This leaves the way clear for the cable companies, whose high-capacity networks do not have the same restrictions as the outfits using BT's infrastructure.

NTL - whose promise of unmetered net access prompted the rush to jump on the bandwagon in the first place - is now sitting pretty. Its got the cable in the ground it can offer net access as part of other telephony and TV offerings.

Having said that, it too has had capacity problems, so all is not rosy among the cable companies either.

But at this moment in time, the cable companies and a handful of the larger, well-established ISPs are the only ones who appear to have viable, long-term unlimited access propositions.