Easynet Ltd has launched a low-cost package and has teamed with BTnet, the networking division of British Telecommunications Plc, to help it achieve its goal of becoming the UK’s premier Internet access provider, regardless of Compuserve or Microsoft. Easynet is the company behind the UK’s three Cyberia cafes, where you can drink coffee and surf the Net, and says it will lease all Cyberia lines from BTnet. It will also recommend BTnet as its preferred supplier of leased lines, and BTnet will recommend Easynet as its preferred supplier of low-cost dial-up access and agree not to compete with Easynet in that specific market. Easynet’s software provides electronic mail, telnet, File Transfer Protocol and all the usual Internet services, together with Netscape Communications Corp’s World Wide Web browser. Easynet believes that with only one real competitor in the low-cost dial-up Internet access market, Demon Internet Ltd, there is room for a big player. And to further undermine Demon, Easynet has just poached its founder, Grahame Davies, as Easynet’s managing director. Current managing director David Rowe will become chairman of Easynet and Cyberia. BTnet says there will be at least three more points of presence by the end of the summer, adding to the two in London and Manchester, rising to 90 by April 1997. Easynet has just 1,400 subscribers at the moment, but director Keith Teare said this figure would be around 5,000 by year-end; after that was difficult to predict. Demon currently has around 30,000 paid subscribers. Easynet is also bundling a 28.8Kbps modem manufactured by Dynalink Ltd with the Easynet access software for ú300, and a 14.4Kbps version for ú200, with a year’s free Internet access in each bundle. There is an initial start-up charge of ú25 and ú120 a year if it is paid in one hit annually, ú12 if paid monthly.
