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By Ben King, 15 October 2001 18:05

NEWS BT has revealed the nature of its policy for dealing with unmetered customers who surf the net too much. Around 30,000 heavy users of BT's Anytime unmetered access product have been moved to a separate 'dial pool', with a different phone number for their modem to dial, 0808 99 33 004 instead of 0808 99 33 001. Users of the punishment pool get a lower 'contention ratio' than other users, which means that in one sense, they get a three times larger share of network resources per person. However, they are effectively being invited to a party where, though they have three times as much beer per person, it's impossible to get a drink because all the guests are alcoholics. Only one third of the users in that pool can be connected at any one time, and since many of them are connected 24 hours a day, the others are often unable to connect. BT COO Ben Andradi conceded that they were likely to get worse net access than users of the 001 numbers, because they were sharing their resources with so many heavy users. "Given the usage patterns that we are seeing in that dial pool, we can't expect to see the figure for unsuccessful first connections coming down much," he said. Andradi insisted that the purpose of the project is not to get rid of customers, but it's difficult to see how the punishment pool can be sustained in the long-term. Furthermore, BT insists that they actually lose money giving its punishment pool customers its extra network resources. And few customers will maintain their accounts if they keep being unable to dial in. BT also disconnects some users for 'unattended use' of the network, or surfing on multiple computers at once. Andradi said that some users racked up over 240 hours use per day in this way. No user subscription will be terminated without being warned, and users who are terminated will have one month's £14.99 subscription refunded as a gesture of goodwill, Andradi said. Around 1,000 users' subscriptions have been terminated since the service was launched.