| Doesn't make cost sense The majority of the cost (to the provider) is maintaining basic connectivity (line rental, bandwidth, etc). The N e-mail addresses, portals, and all the other junk are there largely as marketing tools, the per-user cost of such things is fairly low.
Add to that the fact that a bare-bones internet connection is going to attract exactly the sort of people (i.e. US) who use bandwidth heavily (and thus contribute to costs) and chances are the connection would have to be priced higher, not lower, than a full-service connection. Better to offer a bunch of email accounts to attract a few net.grannies to offset the ISO-downloading server-running bandwidth-burning power users. |
