How Freenet the UK’s First Free ISP Geared Up for the Rapid Growth in Demand

One of the currently more popular training and analysis courses is managing change. This isn't surprising, given the rapid changes being effected by the development of IT and the growth of Internet use, with consequent stresses on companies and individuals. Often it's less a case of managing, more a matter of clinging on to the hurtling toboggan and hoping you'll be able to exercise some real control and direction once a flat stretch appears briefly before the next dip. Exciting it may be, but if you can't get things reasonably under control then that's the end of your company.

FreeNet, a trading brand of Athene Internet Ltd, has been riding this run for about a year, the last seven or eight months in what's seemed at times like free fall. "We've had phenomenal growth", remarks Julian Dyer, MD of Athene, "and it's sometimes been difficult to handle. Fortunately, our systems have worked well and our mail server has scaled easily as demand rocketed."

The first of the new breed of Internet service providers (ISPs) to offer free access, FreeNet went live in July 1998, adding around fifty thousand accounts between November 1998 and June 1999. A major and popular part of the service it offers is routing email and for this it uses NTMail, written and published by UK-based Gordano Ltd.

"We seem to have grown in parallel", says Julian Dyer "and we've been very pleased with NTMail. It's highly scaleable and we don't seem to have stressed it at all."

Athene started in 1986, writing a product called Turbo Quill to speed up word processing on the Sinclair QL. It then opened retail premises selling the Commodore Amiga until it saw how the market was going and switched in 1989 to handling PCs. Like many general computer retailers it got hit by falling margins, mail order sales and the move into commodity PC selling by the likes of Dixons and other electrical chain stores. In 1995 it saw the Internet as an interesting area of potential growth and duly became an ISP, mainly serving subscription customers local to its Hampshire base of Fareham. In January 1998 it set up a local call rate national access number but still had fewer than 1,000 customers.

With the rapid changes in the telecomms market, telcos were starting to offer deals which returned to large users part of the call charges and in July 1998 Athene negotiated just such an arrangement with a supplier. Although the telco had expected standard subscription rates to be continued, Julian Dyer decided to risk cutting rates to zero to stimulate growth, relying for income on the telco rebate which he then expected to grow substantially in real terms. "It might only have been by a week or so", he says, "but as far as we can tell we were the first ISP to offer completely free access using local rate access numbers for 100% of the UK." Other ISPs followed, with Dixon's FreeServe brand becoming the most high-profile of the group and stimulating the market considerably. For Athene's FreeNet, things really took off in November 1998, since when they've been adding around 2,500 customers a week. "The limiting factor", says Dyer, "has been the ability of our two telcos to handle the rate of increase and to understand that we need rapid response."

When Gordano first wrote NTMail the company took a deliberate decision to concentrate on the NT platform, reasoning that although the coverage was then relatively small the platform itself had considerable potential. If it grew then Gordano would grow rapidly with it.

"Tying in closely to NT meant that we could write an extremely fast program which outperforms its competitors", says Brian Dorricott, MD of Gordano and original author of NTMail, "It also meant that we could make it robust and scaleable."

Athene, similarly, had decided to base its ISP activities on an NT platform rather than use the then more popular Unix. This brought its own difficulties. There was a lack of experience and information available and Athene had to develop on their own technical skills to solve problems. According to Pipex, who were then supplying their feed, they were the first ISP to get an NT platform fully working.

One consequence, however, is that FreeNet can now better support its customers, most of whom use Windows 95/98 or NT. FreeNet makes no charge for technical support and puts a great deal of effort into differentiating the brand by offering high quality support.

"We're very familiar with NT", says Dyer, "and this means that our support staff can readily understand the connection and transmission difficulties which a customer may be having and so we solve problems rapidly."

Being an NT house limited their choice of mail servers while a tiny budget reduced it even further. It was these factors, rather than having made a more considered evaluation, which led Athene to Gordano's NTMail.

"It turned out to be a good choice", says Dyer, "and although both the range and our budget have increased we'd almost certainly choose NTMail once more. One of the features we particularly liked is its capability for handling multiple domains transparently, something which makes handling the virtual hosting services we offer very straightforward."

"I also liked the fact that NTMail is easy to set up and configure. While we were familiar with NT we weren't NT wizards and so we could do the work in-house - very important, given our minuscule budget."

Being open for business twenty four hours a day for every day means that reliability and security are of major importance. Customers unable to access email or their Web sites aren't interested in excuses and just want things fixed. Being familiar with NT, Athene has grown into handling security efficiently and believes they've ended up with what is generally a very secure system. Part of their defences rely on the Gordano add-on, JUCE, which offers sophisticated mechanisms to identify and filter spam. NTMail also includes optional anti-virus protection hooks but Athene has chosen not to use these particular links although it welcomes and uses the recent move to browser-based configuration and control.

At present FreeNet runs NTMail and its 50,000+ user accounts from a single server and expects it to cope well with the anticipated increase to double that number shortly.

"100,000 users is probably the limit for a single server", comments Dyer, "and so the imminent new version that allows load balancing is going to be very interesting for us."

Athene certainly isn't standing still and Dyer intends taking control of the changes which will inevitably affect the company. He's working on developing new products, including a unified messaging service bringing together fax, voice, email and more and on offering business customers access profiles controlled through caller IDs. With NTMail already handling thousands of emails daily the Gordano product portfolio is going to remain a major plank in what FreeNet is offering.

With the telecomms market undergoing dramatic change and Internet usage exploding, managing change efficiently is going to remain a priority for FreeNet. However, for a company such as Athene, with a well respected brand and drawing on sound technical understanding of the operating platform and of business requirements, the future looks bright.

Exactly the same could be said of Gordano.