Suffolk ACRE

Suffolk Online is a local community based Internet Service Provider (ISP) which offers highly competitive dialup, and broadband packages to anybody who wishes to signup. Our anytime dialup packages start at £8.75 per month and ADSL broadband packages start at £16.99 per month. Anyone can join Suffolk Online - even if you're not from Suffolk!

All our services are provided by The Phone who were recently voted second by Which for customer satisfaction and overall service quality.

All our packages have anti virus on the email servers, basic anti-spam controls and we also offer the benefit of a locally based helpdesk in Ipswich so should you have a problem with the service it only costs you a local call to get it sorted.

To prove our dedication to improvement, coming in October 07 are substantial improvements to the service which will bring an advanced anti-spam filter, 8MB broadband and many other benefits.

The other major benefits that you get with all Suffolk Online's packages is that there are no long term contracts or no restrictions on usage. A number of other Internet Service Providers are tying you into 1 year or 2 year long contracts and also putting heavy restrictions on the service so that they can offer a highly discounted price.

Call now to signup to any of our packages or if you would like more information on any of our competitively priced internet packages please visit our sales site at www.isp.suffolkonline.net. If you would like to find out more information on the project itself please visit our main portal site at www.suffolkonline.net.

The Helpdesk

Matthew Morling & Danny Austin

Suffolk Online is operated by Suffolk ACRE and is run as a not for profit project, with all profits being ploughed into other community projects. It started as a government funded pilot project to bridge the divide between those who have Internet access and those that don't in the Framlingham area of Suffolk and it was funded by EEDA (East of England Development Agency) & DEFES (Department for education and skills).

This was acheived by providing 1500 computers with Internet connections to households that met a selection criteria in 26 parishes around the Framlingham area. Priority was given to the socially excluded.

The low-cost Internet services provided to the project members has now been extended to anyone who wishes to signup to a low-cost, high quality friendly community ISP. 75% of those original members who were given computers still remain subscribers to the Suffolk Online ISP two and a half years later.

For a promotional video that shows some of the activities that Suffolk Online was involved in, please click on the link below. This video was produced in 2003 to show how we were meeting the aims of the project and bridging the digital divide in Suffolk.

Suffolk Online promo video

During the course of the lifetime of the Suffolk Online project we have also been highly active in lobbying for broadband access being made available to rural areas. In July 2003 we setup a 50 user wireless broadband trial in Badingham, Suffolk which at that time did not have their exchange enabled for broadband. Because of the success of this the trial was extended to 5 further villages (Dennington, Wilby, Brudish, Stradbroke, & Laxfield) in September 2004.

This wireless broadband service has now been closed down because all the exchanges that cover these villages have been enabled, which is partly due to the pressure that organisations like ourselves were putting on BT to cover the whole country through ADSL broadband.

We believe we played a vital part in bridging the gap of high speed Internet access when these 6 villages had no broadband internet access.

In July 2004 we also began to offer conventional ADSL broadband as a project to those people who live in an exchange area which has been enabled. In November 2005 we announced greatly reduced pricing on our existing products and some exciting low-cost Pay As You Go products for as little as £16.99.