AAUGOnline to close | Drobe.co.uk archives

AAUGOnline to close

By Chris Williams. Published: 8th Mar 2005, 17:56:05 | Permalink | Printable

That's all folks for another RISC OS aware ISP

AAUGOnline, a free dial-up ISP for RISC OS users, is set to close its doors. Administrator Neil Spellings, who was once AAUG chairman and also oversees the Aemulor project, said earlier today that problems with the ISP's backbone provider, Griffin, were the final straw.

After AAUGOnline users complained of surprise changes to dial-up phone numbers and call charges, Neil commented: "To be honest, this latest change has signalled the end of AAUGOnline. With Paul [Vigay] setting up Orpheus Internet which also supports broadband (Griffin can but its complicated and beyond my levels of free time) and RISC OS users, I will be closing AAUGOnline to new signups immediately, and recommending existing users transition to another ISP."

He added: "AAUGOnline was always a 'labour of love' - we never made a penny out of it, and with the increased call charges, and people moving away from dial-up, its time to move on."

Now that the barbaric days of dial-up are over, and with modern RISC OS featuring improved networking support (DHCP, ZeroConf, and so on), more and more users are now able to comfortably jump onto the UK broadband bandwagon. RISC OS friendly ISP Argonet is also set to switch off its services later this year.

Links

AAUGOnline website

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Discussion

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I made the switch to broadband a few weeks ago, and it was pretty painless (though I didn't apply for the account using RISC OS). It was just a matter of assigning an IP address and DNS servers (I'm pre-DHCP) and adding my mac address and IP address to the router (which admittedly I can't configure from my RISC PC, not having a Javascript compatible browser).

It's a slight shame I couldn't keep my dial-up settings as a backup - it doesn't seem to switch DNS servers when I connect, even though the old settings are still in Socketeer - but in practice I've not had any broadband downtime yet, so it's looking like I don't need them.

If anything, getting broadband set up was easier than getting online with dial-up all those years ago. There's no dial-up software or modem configuration strings needed. And now I can finally afford to keep up to date with Netsurf - it only takes a few seconds through my 100Mb/s NIC.

ninja on 8/3/05 6:09PM
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I too didn't use RISC OS to sign up for broadband, the helpful sales guy at Demon took my details over the phone.

RComp's broadband solutions come with good documentation which makes the process fairly painless.

Wouldn't be without broadband now. :-)

niftybit on 8/3/05 7:55PM
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It's fully understandable the AAUGOnline has to end, certainly with many RO users switching, or having switched, to broadband.

I'd say Neil has more important things to do now, like bringing us DVD support on RO

On the other hand, it is fortunate The Vigay is on our side and willing to fill this particular niche with the aptly named Orpheus ISP. It might be appropriate for AAUGOnline to suggest its users to consider switching to Orpheus.

hEgelia on 8/3/05 10:33PM
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As sad day, but it is the way of the world. I haven't dialled into my AAUGonline account for months, and last time I looked my mailbox was full of spam that I didn't wait to download. I probably won't use it again, although having a second string is sometimes useful. I am now on NTLworld 750K broadband, and can't imagine ever wanting to go back to dialup. BTW is managed to register my NTL account with RISC OS with no problems. AAUGonline was one of the few ISPs that offered email help, which was usually needed only because of problems with their upsteam provider changing things. I sometimes had a response within a few minutes. I would like to thank Neil and the others involved for their efforts. They gave us a RISC OS friendly ISP when few others wanted to know about RISC OS.

mrtd on 9/3/05 9:01AM
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I will be updating the AAUGOnline website with links to Orpheus, and some Free ISPs at some point. The AAUGOnline domain name expires in May this year, so users will have around 4 months to sort out an alternative. I think with the new phone number and call charges, many people have already switched.

Unfortunately, there is no facility for emailing all subscribers, so hopefully everyone checks the newsgroups and news sites every so often.

The AAUG.net email forwarding/spam filtering service remains unaffected by this announcement, and will continue into the forseeable future.

Thanks for everyone's support over the years; hopefully we've enabled more RISC OS users to get online than otherwise might have done with the majority of the 'free' ISPs not supporting the software RISC OS users use.

Cheers,

/Neil/ www.spellings.net

spellinn on 9/3/05 12:59PM
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I found getting broadband on my Risc PC to be completely painless. Add an assigned IP address in the routers DHCP server via the cards MAC address, and get !Internet to get it from there. After that everything worked immeadiatly.

Trapper on 9/3/05 1:03PM
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Anyone on ntl might like to try the free upgrade to 2Mb:

https://autoreg.autoregister.net/cgi/cabletier?cust=ntworld_tiermigration

mrchocky on 9/3/05 1:31PM
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With an associated drop in the download/month cap?

Spriteman on 9/3/05 1:55PM
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Only for the 300 Kbps subscribers. The 750 Kbps and 1.5 Mbps subscribers get the upgrade to 2 Mbps and 3 Mbps respectively without any alteration to their cap.

Dougal on 9/3/05 4:10PM
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Freedom2Surf Power ADSL 1024/256 for £32GBP pcm

The 512/256 service is around £22

No caps

Trapper on 9/3/05 7:16PM
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in Japan i had 12MBit/1MBit broadband at home at the same prices as 512kBit is here. And this was in a rural town of 30,000 people two hours drive from a major city! In the cities, it is now considered pretty slow with 50MBit/3MBit readily and cheaply available these days [link]

I never did obtain any stats on the real speed of the connection, maybe it felt marginally faster than the 512kBit Nildram service I have now for day to day browsing. Got some impressive download speeds with BitTorrent though ;-)

govind on 9/3/05 11:12PM
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Wow! Thanks for the tip

I've gone up from 300Kb to 1Mb for free! With regards the cap for the 1000 service, here's a quote from the ntl User Policy: "Over the next 12 months, ntl will provide tools to allow customers to measure their data usage ... Until these tools are available, ntl will monitor usage but not apply the 3GB allowance". There are no caps for the higher rates.

Adam

adamr on 10/3/05 8:18PM
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