The telephone toll

By David Brake

Jan 18, 1999 | | LONDON -- I live in a third world country -- at least as far as the Internet goes. Last month I paid more than $150 for my Net access. I was almost resigned to this fate until I returned for Christmas to Canada, where I used to live, only to find that almost everyone I knew had signed up for either DSL, which offers high-speed Internet service over normal phone lines, or cable modem Internet access. Even my Dad is surfing at 10 times my speed, for just $25 a month.

Of course the backwater I live in has its compensations. My home is London, capital city of Cool Britannia. Samuel Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." True enough -- but an Internet life of North American standards is only barely affordable.

If you wonder why you don't see more people from outside North America online, there is one simple reason -- local telephone charges. Here in the United Kingdom, you pay $3.88 an hour between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. for any local call -- if you sign up for the maximum discount level British Telecom could supply (costing another $3 a month), you can get that down to $2.90. Even the briefest of phone calls will still cost 7 cents, and telephone line rental costs a further $14 a month (though if you have cable it can cost you less).

On top of that, of course, you need to have signed up with an Internet service provider -- an account with UUNet, which mostly caters to business, costs around $25 a month. With prices like these, it is a wonder anyone uses the Internet at home at all. Overall, some 80 percent of Europeans without home Internet access said in a recent study that they were unlikely to get it -- if they were offered Internet without a per-minute phone charge, 40 percent said they would be likely to sign up.

Erol Ziya of the British-based Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications says that the high cost of Internet access is more than just a consumer pricing issue. "Some of our strongest supporters are the disabled and the unemployed. Many of the disabled people we speak to say they have no access to the world except through the phone and the modem -- charging by the minute is a severe detriment to the quality of their lives."

Metering Net usage via per-minute phone charges doesn't only boost European Net users' phone bills -- it affects the nature of their online experiences. Forget surfing and schmoozing; we must get in, get our information and get out.