NEWS 07.05.99 Barclays Bank's free internet service provider (ISP) service has gone live this week with 24,000 customers already registered.
Barclays.net gives access to all the high-street bank's online financial services including stockbroking and banking.
BT is providing the telephony backbone, while Excite provides the portal service.
07.05.04 This move isn't to be confused with Barclays' online banking service, which was by this stage very much up and running. No, this story harks back to a period when just about every company thought they could and should be an ISP. How wrong they were.
The era of the free ISP - ushered in by Freeserve and a few others - got people thinking that they too could capture customers, or pull together existing services, and maybe make some money from dial-up revenue splits in the process.
In this case, Barclays partnered with BT (for telecoms) and Excite (for portal content). Similar deals were struck by newspapers - as we exclusively revealed around that time - retailers, football teams and others.
But even those with a good reason to take their users online beyond internet enabling existing services - the mobile phone companies come to mind - found it hard to justify an ISP business in the end. Look at the field now - odds are you and many others use a specialist ISP, from your office, home and mobile device.
