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This post is actually inspired by a couple of my customers. Being in pursuit for the cheapest dialup service, I came across 650Dialup. Its advertised as $6.50 / month, unlimited dialup internet service.

650DialUp — for fast and reliable unlimited dial up access at an unbelievably low price.

That to me means I could be connected 24 hours a day 7 days a week, all month long. Well not according to my clients. I got a couple of phone calls stating that after a couple of hours online they would get disconnected. I thought it was probably due to there phone lines in the area they live. On good days they can manage a decent connection, but throw in some bad weather and it drops dramatically. So I decided to take a run out to there house and run a couple of tests. Thats when I found out that its exactly 5 hours to the minute they get disconnected. Then they cant reconnect for at least a half an hour. Thats strange I told her. Well I decided to hit up there website and look for a fair usage clause in there terms. This is what i found:

Maximum Single Session - User agrees to have an online session automatically terminated after five (5) hours of consecutive time, regardless of data transferred during such specific online session.

Okay so there is limitation number one, I informed the client that this must be an amendment to the terms and conditions that we over looked. She was okay with it, she said its actually nice to get disconnected it limits the amount of time spent online. The following week she called me back, she said she couldn’t even login to the internet. First thing I did was check there terms sheet again for some other goofy limitation. I couldnt find much other than Idle timeout and multiple concurent connections. I can understand those. The next step I called there tech support line and waited an hour to talk to someone. Once someone decided to answer the phone I was greeted by a friendly young guy. He asked for my clients user name and looked into the problem, the next thing he told me blew my mind. “Your client seems to have run over her 200hr cap on her account.” I asked when they started this and he stated that it has always been like this. I didn’t want to argue so I asked how much it would cost to get her back online, he stated he couldn’t do that, she is over her limit if she wants online create another account and use both throughout the month so you don’t go over your cap. I about lost it, I asked where on their website does it state that the unlimited accounts have a 200 hr cap. He said that its in there terms and usage page. Here it is, I still cant find it to this day. I had a total of 35 clients running 650Dialup and now are happy customers somewhere else. If someone finds this please let me know. So much for unlimited.

So why do they still advertise it as unlimited.  I have no clue, it would have been nice to let there users actually know about system changes.  I was a customer of theirs for almost 4 years.  I had no problems with their service, then one day they decided to change the rules and not notify their customers.  For the readers I already sent the URL to both their billing department and also the support department.  I will be posting there answer to my post hopefully soon.