There are also wide variations in subscribers' access to the Internet, the performance of their local technology, and their personal skills and experience as users of the Internet. Some subscribers have reliable, high speed access from company or government offices or universities for which the individual user incurs no cost, others are private subscribers in countries with high telephone charges and fragile access to the Internet, using slow speed modems and low performance PCs. Some subscribers are technology specialists with ten or more years experience of online working, others started using email only recently and are still feeling their way. We take the view that all these different kinds of people have a worthwhile contribution to make to the general pool of knowledge and understanding. Simple email is the most obvious solution given these criteria.
Today there are significant issues about Internet performance between countries.
In many European countries, access to and from the United States is better than access to and from another country in Europe. Some of our subscribers in developing countries have only occasional access and poor quality routings. The main activities of European Telework Online are privately funded or based on voluntary efforts. Our support from the European Commission via the ETD initiative covers less than a quarter of the costs of running the service. We charge no subscriptions.