Why don't you offer unlimited hours like everyone else?

It sounds nice, but the drawbacks of that kind of service both for us and our subscribers may not be readily apparent. To offer unlimited hours and really mean it would mean you could stay connected 24 hours a day every day if you wanted to. That phone line in our office that you'd be consuming costs us in excess of $50/month. To charge under $30/month for use of a resource that alone costs us $50/month isn't wise from a business standpoint.

Of course, not many users would go to that extreme. It would only take a few of those, however, to drive down the effective user/modem ratio for everybody else, which means more busy signals. This goes against our commitment to providing reliable Internet connectivity, whenever you need it, to all of our customers. Example: Suppose we have 800 users and 100 lines, for a user/modem ratio of 8/1. Suppose 25 users decide they are going to use their unlimited time to its full potential and never hang up. That leaves 775 users and 75 lines, for an effective user/modem ratio of worse then 10/1. The higher that figure goes, the higher the chance of all lines being full when you need to get online goes as well.

There is related issue here, too: we think it's unfair for you who only use a few hours each month to pay the same rate as those who stay on all day and night. This is why we offer three usage-based pricing levels. You use less, you pay less. Your needs change, your price changes.

But how do the other guys do it then?

We figure they fall into one or more of these groups:

• They haven't figured out the above yet.
• Their commitment to avoiding busy signals isn't very strong.
• They have very deep pockets and can afford to risk operating at a loss until their user base gets huge enough to compensate, or the competition goes away, or they go broke. (This is becoming more common)
• Their definition of "unlimited" isn't what you'd expect. This is often the case. Read the fine print, or ask them. You'll find that very often there are limits, sometimes applied arbitrarily. We'd rather be up front and tell you how much modem time you can consume before we have to start charging more.