Two more UK companies will jump on the free ISP bandwagon on Thursday with the launch of a new service that allows users to surf the web without paying local dial-up charges. Tempo Ltd is teaming up with Localtel Ltd, a reseller of minutes over BT’s network, to deliver a service called screaming.net. Traditional free ISP services, pioneered by Dixons with its Freeserve offering, make money by taking a slice of the local call charges while offering subscriptions to the service for free. Tempo and Localtel says that their offering differs because all calls made between 6pm and 8am will be free, so customers will only be required to pay for local calls during business hours and they will be charged at 10% below BT’s peak rate. As well as money from peak rate calls, the companies plan to draw in revenue from advertising.
Earlier this month X-Stream Network, an advertising-funded free ISP, began offering free calls to its service between midnight and 2am Monday to Thursday. But the offer was so popular that the network’s performance was adversely affected. Similarly, Freeserve has come under criticism for lack of speed. Tempo has less market penetration than Dixons, with only 44 stores nationwide, so screaming.net is unlikely to become as oversubscribed as Freeserve and Tempo says it will only distribute as many start-up CDs as it knows its network can handle.
