French Users Complain

France.internet.com reports that the latest complaints against the ISP OneTel, on top of the disappearance of AltaVista's ISP, have called into question the validity of the free ISP model. The future of consumer choice in Europe looks bleak.

by Frédéric Vladyslav
of france.internet.com, courtesy of vnunet.com
[August 23, 2000]

France.internet.com reports that subscribers to OneTel's ISP found an unpleasant surprise: charges hidden in the fine print (see the French version of this story here).

OneTel is an Australian operator whose free ISP model was supported by the provision of voice services — subscribers effectively paid for Internet access by changing to OneTel for phone service.

Past problems
Just last month (see article in French here), there were complaints when OneTel closed a significant number of accounts. Of OneTel's 37,000 subscribers, OneTel had cut off 4,000, but the subscribers' association, ADIM, forced OneTel to reinstall 3,000. Among OneTel's complaints was the strange charge that some users had been online for over 24 hours per day.

ADIM claimed that OneTel's security had been lax, making it easy to use other subscribers' accounts (the default password was the same for all subscribers).

On the message boards, the accusation was that OneTel had closed the accounts of all subscribers who were online more than 100 hours per month.

Bigger mess now
But that was a minor problem compared to the present crisis.

Apparently, buried in the fine print of an "unlimited access" offer was a 14 Centimes-per-minute fee (about 2 cents per minute). Users who did not read the fine print were shocked with a first-month charge of as much as 8000 French Francs, just over $1,100. Presumably, the security flaws described the month before had not been fixed.

ADIM claims to have received over 300 complaints per day, and is ready to take legal action.

The big picture
Just this week, AltaVista's press relations staff ended their cat-and-mouse game with the media and admitted that the service had never existed even though it had almost 300,000 subscribers (story here).

Of course AOL is doing well, and other ISPs continue to operate, but the future of consumer choice in Europe looks bleak.

—End