Lars-Einar Jansson asked on: Sun, 21 Nov 1999
> BTW, are there any ISPs offering so called shell accounts in other parts
> of the world?
As much (or few) as I know, i (continental/Western) Europe shell
accounts had been extremely rare - I knew one, accessible to a
restricted public in Belgium, end of the eighties/early nineties; if
there were any, they existed at Univs and were not accessible for common
earthlings (i.e., students, not to speak of non-Univ people).
This has been very different from the US condition (and I think, BTW,
that this is the reason for one poster's non-comprehension of the Net
access/ISP distinction in the Nettamer list): there, a lot of ISPs (often
BBSs) had started off with shell accounts for the general public, and
long before there were dial-in points to *NET* access providers (IAPs),
the ISPs/BBSs (or even FIDO nodes) serving as gateways.
This situation has changed completely, and by now hardly any ISPs are
left offering shell accounts - what has *not* changed very much, is the
number of "Acces/Net Service Providers": in fact those thousands of ISPs
crowding the market place all use the same two handfuls of IAPs (and
these in turn the one handful of uplink and backbone providers, five in
Germany, for instance, IIRR). This made for the spree in ISPs - you
hire server capacity and storage volume where ever you get it cheapest,
and negotiate with the IAPs the share of connection fees; which in
turn negotiate with the Telcos those "interconnection rates" of which
they all get their money from - but this makes it almost impossible to
dial-up "your" ISP directly, except it (still) has an own, local server
as the dial-up point. And it's at *this* entry-point where any shell
must be installed. IAPs wouldn't do that, unless they get extra pay;
but thanks to the pseudo-"free" access humdrum this is out of the
question.
(Thus no X-Y-Zmodem traffic to the dial-in point with Commo, Telix or
whatsoever either, it's PPP and packaged "datagrams" all the way
from/to your own bus interface.)
Only because of (sic) the earlier predominance of comm-prog. dial-up
shell accounts in North America (and only there, rest of the world was
later and "leapfrogged" into the void of PPP and lost packages) there's
still a number of ISPs with (local) servers around there. But these
are islands in the sea.
> ... It seems to me that the larger the ISP, the
> less they know about configuration issues. Instead they supply pre-
> configured CD-ROMs with M$IE...
Sure. Because their call-centre "services" would hardly be allowed to
know details about the ISP's business tricks (where that physical
server with your mailbox is hired or what IAP they use; though at least
the latter is rather easy to find out.) Of four "Free Internet Access!!!"
offers promoted with much ado in the last weeks here in Brussels,
three used the same IAP, the fourth was a disguised inroad into the
Belgian market of an hitherto fee demanding "foreign" telco-owned ISP.
// Heimo Claasen // <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // Brussels 1999-11-27
HomePage of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.inti.be/hammer
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