What flat-rate does is make the Internet a mass media,' said Peacock. The Friaco model was created by economists commissioned by AOL UK, which teamed up with MCI WorldCom and complained to Oftel when BT rejected the plan. Oftel found against BT and is now forcing it to offer wholesale flat-rate tariffs in regional and local exchanges to its rivals. We repeatedly told Oftel that something had to be done. Utopia it is often assumed to be.
People are aware of the ticking clock in the background.
That means the average time online is currently 10 to 12 minutes per user on average, which is quite short. Duke-Wooley predicted that the Friaco tariffs will shake up ISPs. Some ISPs have a ratio of 50 to one, and some have more than that, because they are trying to reduce their costs,' he said. He added that metered services will not disappear, but flat-rate services will take a large part of the market, and that smaller ISPs will have to alter their revenue models or go out of business. The possibility of degraded connection quality as the number of users increases is an issue raised by networking giant 3Com.