Why is dialup so expensive?

[#1]

Like the title says. I am helping out a friend who cannot get broadband. After hearing that he is paying BT £15.99/month for dialup I was almost sick. Couldn't beleive it so I priced it with PN to find the same sort of pricing.
Dialup is not about 3 times more expensive than it was in 2001 when I last used it, why?

[#2]

That's what I paid BT internet back in 2003, so to stay the same in real terms means it's cheaper?

[#3]

With PN that is only for 160 hours/month. To get 400 hours/month is £39.13!
When I had Freeserve anytime in 2001 I paid £14.99 and I could stay connected for the entire month if I wanted.

[#4]

I'd hazard a guess that it has something to do with having to maintain and pay for a great deal of Dial-Up access kit that is being used less and less.  It must be hard to sustain the business case for dial up these days?   Perhaps a case for many ISP's dropping support in favour of a smaller set of niche players who can then make a business out of it?
Not good news, but understandable.
M

[#5]

Compare it with dialup PAYG where you pay by the minute through your normal phone bill and I suggest you'd find that in fact the prices of the packages are pretty reasonable!

[#6]

Quote from: Sean

With PN that is only for 160 hours/month. To get 400 hours/month is £39.13! When I had Freeserve anytime in 2001 I paid £14.99 and I could stay connected for the entire month if I wanted.

Yes, but that's before Freeserve realised they were losing money with that so they started cutting back, setting particular time limits to their packages - rather like what happened in the world of broadband, when we went from unlimited to most-definitely-not-unlimited.
Assuming the wholesale cost hasn't gone down, which I don't think it has, it costs IIRC something like £80-£100 per month for one dial-up 'port', where a port basically provides the ability to have one 24/7 dial-up connection. So someone who wanted a 24-7 dialup connection would need to pay the full cost of a port in order for the ISP to not lose money - and indeed, if you look at Plusnet's 'Anytime Business Premier' dialup package, they charge £95 a month.

[#7]

That all does make sense but it just does not seam right to pay that sort of money for a connection which by todays standards is practically unuseable. Lets face it, who now builds lite websites with the dialup user in mind?
Thankfully for me ADSL appeared in my area before dialup went through the roof.

[#8]

Yes, I do remember the early glory days of broadband when I was synced with my exchange at 576Kbps and my connection (in general use) was most definitely faster than it is now despite now being synced with my exchange at 3000Kbps (approx).
My 500th post, ye ha!

[#9]

You chance to make some money in the old days we used to charge people to use our BB they dial into your system as a local call and if you have a server login as a user using Terminal server and use you BB. It work fantastic and you wouldnt know your on dialup the only down side is if they want to download files as that goes to your hd but you can write them out to a pen drive dvd for a small cost. If they arnt to far away they could use your wireless with a good Yagii we could get up to a mile away depending in line of site and us having a big antenna on the roof. We did it as half of Crewe couldn't get BB and it was only 1/4 mile away.

[#10]

I done a similar thing with wireless when broadband first came to my area. In the days before MaxDSL when BT just said no if you lived X number of miles from the exchange. I was within reach, a good friend was not. We built a wireless bridge spanning 964 metres (according to multimap) using Dlink access points and directional antennas. Of course a couple of months after we spent the time and money ADSL was extended and then covered his house. This was just a little kick in the teeth. I refused to decommision the wireless bridge which is still in use today. The pictures are on my site.

[#11]

your lucky at 576k  When I started to communicate with the base computer we did it via a teletypwriter and punched tape, made the tape up off line as that was slower than the dial up and then fed it through at higher speed dread to think how slow that was but wasnt in k's

[#12]

Years ago when I was on dialup I used to use MIP cards (My Internet Pass). They were said to be the cheapest company around for dialup and ASFAIK still are.
You just buy a £10 card either for the month (unlimited) or for 2000 minutes. - equates to something like 0.5p per minute.
When it is expired another card is purchased and you enter the number in your dialup connection box.
At the time I got a bit fed up with it because the server was often busy, necessitating repeated dial-ins.
I think that this wouldn't be the case now though as most people use broadband.
http://www.mipcards.com/