Broadband with free dial-up?

Hi,

Are there any good broadband providers who offer free dialup access as part of their broadband package? This is handy in times of broadband outage.

Edited by Sojurn (Sat 22-Mar-08 18:11:33)

Do you mean totally free as in 0800 numbers?

Newnet are a good ISP and have "free" 0845 dialup included.

Also Purple Cloud, my domain and email supplier, (I don't like ISP email services as sometimes they are flakey, the addresses are long and often yucky, and it's a huge PITA when you migrate), have an 0845 number you can use even if you are not a customer.

So that is available even if you don't find an ISP with FREE and if Newnet is not suitable.

Click either in my sig.

Yeah I mean totally free, as in no call charges whatsoever.

Before broadband came around, we were able to pay a flat-rate fee for unlimited dial-up access.

I can't remember if that was only offered by BT and Telewest though. But that's how it used to work, you would pay about �20 per month and no call charges for unlimited dialup.

Perhaps this was only offered by telephone companies like BT and Telewest though, can't remember.. I would hope that 3rd parties did offer this (surely AOL did), and that now they could integrate this with broadband fee.

I don't really want to use dialup, but as i'm paying the fee for broadband, i'd like to have backup for when the ADSL is down.

Edited by Sojurn (Sat 22-Mar-08 18:25:44)

Hi there,

We offer free (0808) dial up services during a fault on your line (this is automatically triggered when you raise a fault via our automated fault checker).

At all other times you can access 0845 dialup services as part of your account.

You can see all our account features here.

Thanks that looks good to me.

I read somewhere that PlusNet have a special offer for migrating freedom2surf users, though I can't find any mention of it on their site, you know of anything like that?

Minor problem using dialup when there is a fault on your line . Especially if you have a desktop or tower not a laptop. With a laptop, whose phone are you going to use?

You also asked for a good ISP. Well Plusnet is no longer bad, but....

You should also examine closely how your usage will fit into the Plusnet traffic shaping and capping system. I find it extremely complex and frankly do not understand it. There seem to be several different descriptions. The only good thing about it is that they publish it, where many other ISPs just refer to an undisclosed FUP.

And I have no axe at all to grind. It matters not one jot to me what you choose. But I suggest you weigh up how often you are going to be seriously out of pocket using 0845 if necessary.

There is also the possibility that the better ISPs offer what you want. Not my job to look into that . Entanet do not sell direct, just through resellers, so possibly some may offer free dialup, though probably not all. Another comparison - out of the top 12 there Fast, IDNet, Zen and Newnet are the only ones not Entanet resellers.

The others have consistently good speeds but cost a bit more for high downloaders. Under 20GB per month Entanet is not the right choice.

Entanet's high ratings everywhere are based on their huge bandwidth allowances for the price. Their customers are there for that so very satisfied. The downside of that is the ALT system which applies to all Entanet resellers not just ADSL24, which happens to be one of the better ones it seems from the Entanet forum on this site.

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 22-Mar-08 22:03:13)

Hi there,

There was a 1 month free offer, but unfortunately this ended in February.

We've got a few special offers on at the moment from discounted Home Phone to free Max Premium for 3 months, depending on what your priorities are, and there's always the 90 day guarantee if you do decide we're not for you.

Well in the 5+ years i have had BB i think i have had 2 outages of longer than a couple of hours.
The time and effort that was spent getting the PC to run on a 56k modem was a real pain and just not worth the effort.
Don't tnink many isp will offer it as its not cost effective. THey will have to pay a fee to BT or such for the facility to be able to offer the service, so its going to bump your monthly cost up. They may offer a service thats like 1p a min or whatever.

Well recently with F2S i've had 2 outages that are over 24 hours. As I work from home I need the internet connection and have been forced to use dialup. I mean I had to browse the net on my old mobile phone to find a dial up number, no cover from my ISP. This weekend was great because they all took good friday off while their network was on the fritz.

Don't forget that if you have dialup with the ISP then if their main server goes down then dialup to them is no use either. Only if its just the broadband connections that have gone.

Re dialup elsewhere - already posted on that.